These events were in many ways the fevered culmination of the long campaign after the Civil War to reverse its outcome by putting the now-freed slaves in a continued state of submission by other means—violent ones.

The centerpiece of this campaign was lynching. As a form of terrorism intended to keep black people from participating in the political process or from even objecting to their subjugation under Jim Crow laws, it was brutally effective. Between 1870 and 1930, literally thousands of black people were summarily executed by their white neighbors, most often for the crime of being somehow “uppity”—that is, a threat to the whites’ own social status in one way or another.

The Tuskegee Institute in Alabama began keeping statistics in 1900, though the peak of the phenomenon may have been during the early 1870s, in the fight over Reconstruction. Regardless, the Tuskegee numbers alone tell the story: Between 1882 and 1968, some 3,445 black people were definitively lynched in America. (Most historians consider the Tuskegee numbers too conservative.)

The rationale for these horrific acts lay in a kind of guilty white projection, in which black males—many of whom were in fact the progeny of their mothers’ rapes by their white masters—were demonized widely as likely rapists, sexual brutes with ravenous appetites. The supposed threat of black rape, and the ensuing protection of “white womanhood” by “gallant men” of determination who moved in mobs and slaughtered with extreme violence, made it all justified as necessary self-defense in the popular white view.

Ida B. Wells

Civil rights pioneer Ida B. Wells in the 1880s began examining the facts behind the wave of lynchings still gaining momentum in America and determined that in most cases, “rape” was merely a pretext for other causes, usually a white woman caught with a black man. Later studies have found that actual black criminality was only occasionally the actual cause of lynchings. Far more often, black people were lynched for being too successful by white standards. Economic jealousy fueled many a lynching.

It’s also difficult to convey just how terribly barbaric these events were, especially for black people, without shocking people’s modern sensibilities. Yet part of the reason for our continuing racial divide is white people’s unwillingness to look this history in the face. So let me use words instead of images—though many hundreds of them exist—to convey this history. Because they are shocking enough, and it is history that most white people are utterly, blithely, happily ignorant about. That has to end.

A memorial museum dedicated to the victims of lynching opened in 2018 in Montgomery, Alabama. It is powerful and devastating, and a vital corrective for the many people who know nothing of this history.

White apologists for these events often demur by claiming that white people were lynched too. This is true, especially regarding the Old West and its vigilantes. Yet the numbers of these lynchings of whites were small compared to black lynchings. Moreover, when whites were lynched, they were simply hanged till dead, and that was it. They remained clothed. Their bodies weren’t desecrated. They were taken down and buried. That didn’t happen often for black people.

When blacks were lynched—as we shall see, not merely in the South, but throughout white America—truly horrific violence was visited upon their bodies. They were tortured and maimed during the hangings. Black men were fed their own penises on the gallows. The crowds often set large bonfires over which they would raise and lower the victim, often already dead, until he burned up. At times the mobs would deliberately prolong their suffering. And then they would all pose for photos afterwards.

These photos became popular postcards that were widely circulated in the early part of the 20th century. A collection of these postcards and similar photos can be found in the essential collection Without Sanctuary.

Parents put their children in the front row at lynchings, as with Rubin Stacy’s murder by a mob in Florida in 1935.

Lynchings were hugely popular community events. Parents ensured that their children, especially their daughters, had front-row seats, so they could see what it took to preserve white maidenhood. And, in their minds, it was all justified. Indeed, it was celebrated in popular culture. One of the bestsellers of the age was Thomas Dixon’s The Clansman, a 1905 encomium to the Ku Klux Klan that culminates with the lynching of a black rapist. The book and a play adapted from it had audiences in the millions. In 1915, filmmaker D.W. Griffith turned it into his epic The Birth of a Nation, which was a national sensation that millions viewed, including a White House audience. It not only made Hollywood the epicenter of filmmaking, but it also revived the KKK.

This period has become known among historians as the nadir of American race relations, an apt if too antiseptic term for the horrors it contained. It began in earnest in 1890, when Republicans abandoned Reconstruction, and black Southerners with it. One of the major factors that fueled the nadir was the Great Migration—the mass movement of former slaves out of the South to the North and Midwest. The majority first moved into rural areas and took up farming, since that was what most of them knew.

This demographic shift seemed to work fine for about a generation, but, eventually, non-Southern whites’ attitudes about their black neighbors began to shift, thanks in no small part to the common demonization of black males found in popular culture. Likewise, the increasing celebration of lynching as a response to the presence of “threatening” black men led to it becoming a common event not just in the South, but in the Midwest and elsewhere.

Eventually this violence—which, like modern hate crimes, was intended as threatening messages to vulnerable minorities, telling them to get out—morphed into larger-scale expulsions, outright ethnic-cleansing events. After The Birth of a Nation glorified lynching nationally in 1915, and the revived Klan became not just a small Southern phenomenon but a national organization with charters and large memberships in every state, the violence became even more intense.

The presence of a violent, rampaging mob meant that not only did single lynchings grow into multiple-lynching events, but they also turned into burning, pillaging, and mass murder. These horrific ethnic-cleansing events were given the euphemism “race riots.”

There were race riots in Tennessee, Louisiana, and Mississippi during Reconstruction, but they quickly spread broadly to places that included New York (1900) and Springfield, Ohio (1904 and 1906). One of the largest mass race riots occurred in East St. Louis, Missouri, in 1917.

The problems in St. Louis revolved around postwar job competition and the use of black strikebreakers by meatpacking industry owners, which resulted in a tinder-box situation culminating in three days of utter lawlessness and murder. Dozens were killed and maimed.

One of the factors that aggravated the situation, beginning in 1917 and afterwards, was the return of black American soldiers, war veterans, to their hometowns, both in the South and elsewhere. These men were not celebrated as heroes; they were often in fact lynched. Again, lynchings really were not directed at criminals: They far more often targeted the “uppity” blacks who were succeeding socially. And no black men were more of a threat in this regard (probably due to their perceived virility) than war vets. Black vets, especially in 1918, were a direct challenge to the tenets of white supremacy that held that only white men were capable of higher thought and bravery and capability. So they were targeted for lynching with a particular urgency and venom.

This thinking was encouraged by editorials such as one in the St. Francisville (Louisiana) True Democrat in December 1918:

NIP IT IN THE BUD The press reports the taking of a negro soldier out by a mob and lynching him for resisting arrest and assaulting an officer. The root of the trouble was that the negro thought being a soldier he was no subject to civil authority. The incident is a portent of what may be expected in the future as more of the negro soldiery returns to civil life. The conditions of active warfare and the regulations of army life have probably given these men more exalted ideas of their station in life than really exists, and having these ideas they will be guilty of many acts of self-assertion, arrogance and insolence which will not be borne with, in the South at least, and which will be followed by consequences to them more or less painful. Looking ahead one can see that there will be much friction before they sink back into their old groove, and accept the fact that social equality will never be accepted in the South.

The lynching violence in general was reaching an incredibly savage level of bloodlust. One of the worst of all the lynchings—that of Hayes and Mary Turner in Valdosta, Georgia—took place in May 1918. Its horror is difficult to imagine, much less describe, so I will leave it to the fine work of Philip Dray, from his definitive work on lynching, At the Hands of Persons Unknown, pp. 245-246:

One of the stories to sear readers’ sensibilities was that of Haynes and Mary Turner of Valdosta, Georgia, and their former boss, white planter Hampton Smith, who had been killed May 16, 1918, by someone shooting into his home. His terrified wife, who was wounded, ran into the woods and wandered around for hours before being taken in by neighbors. She accused a black man named Sidney Johnson of having carried out her husband’s murder, but he disappeared and could not be found, despite the best efforts of a hastily formed lynch mob. Irritated at not being able to lay hands on their primary suspect, the lynchers exacted summary revenge on several other black men, including Hayes Turner, who was known to have disliked Smith. Mary Turner, who was eight months pregnant, was infuriated by her husband’s death. She declared him innocent and vowed to seek justice, although, as The Atlanta Constitution reported, she protested what had occurred too vehemently and “made unwise remarks … the people were angered by her remarks, as well as her attitude.” The sheriff placed her under arrest, possibly for her own protection, but then gave her up to a mob that took her away to the Little River at a place called Folsom’s Bridge. There, before a crowd that included women and children, Mary was stripped, hung upside down by the ankles, soaked with gasoline, and roasted to death. In the midst of this torment, a white man opened her swollen belly with a hunting knife and her infant fell to the ground, gave a cry, and was stomped to death. The Constitution’s coverage of the killing was subheadlined: “Fury of People is Unrestrained.” “Mister, you should’ve heard the nigger wench howl!,” [NAACP field investigator] Walter White, in Georgia to investigate the case, was told by a helpful white man who took him to the site of the lynching. Turner and her infant had been buried directly beneath the tree on which she’d died, and someone had set up an empty whiskey bottle with a half-smoked cigar in its neck as a “tombstone.” White sent Governor Dorsey the names of seventeen members of the mob that had killed Mary Turner, but Dorsey’s office sent back what seemed almost a form letter saying that all efforts to bring the guilty to justice had been futile.

The bloodlust was in the air. The stage was set for the nation’s worst and most prolonged outbreak of racial violence, the Red Summer of 1919.

Next: A yearlong Red Summer of white mob violence