Lynching and Race Riots in the United States,1880-1950 (Robert A. Gibson, Yale, 2004)
In light of recent events - in Baltimore, in NYC, in Ferguson, and all across America:
The historical record is brutally clear. This is incredibly ugly stuff, and the worst part is: not only does the impact of this history continue to be felt, but Black lives still are in grave danger-and often times, lethally so - on a daily basis.
This history matters, to understand the present...
The United States has a brutal history of domestic violence. It is an ugly episode in our national history that has long been neglected. Of the several varieties of American violence, one type stands out as one of the most inhuman chapters in the history of the world: the violence committed against Negro citizens in America by white people. This unit of post Reconstruction Afro-American history will examine anti-Black violence from the 1880s to the 1950s. The phenomenon of lynching and the major race riots of this period, called the American Dark Ages by historian Rayford W. Logan, will be covered.
Immediately following the end of Reconstruction, the Federal Government of the United States restored white supremacist control to the South and adopted a laissez-faire policy in regard to the Negro. The Negro was betrayed by his country. This policy resulted in Negro disfranchisement, social, educational and employment discrimination, and peonage. Deprived of their civil and human rights, Blacks were reduced to a status of quasi-slavery or second-class citizenship. A tense atmosphere of racial hatred, ignorance and fear bred lawless mass violence, murder and lynching.
snip:
In the last decades of the nineteenth century, the lynching of Black people in the Southern and border states became an institutionalized method used by whites to terrorize Blacks and maintain white supremacy. In the South, during the period 1880 to 1940, there was deep-seated and all-pervading hatred and fear of the Negro which led white mobs to turn to lynch law as a means of social control. Lynchings open public murders of individuals suspected of crime conceived and carried out more or less spontaneously by a mob seem to have been an American invention. In Lynch-Law, the first scholarly investigation of lynching, written in 1905, author James E. Cutler stated that lynching is a criminal practice which is peculiar to the United States.
Most of the lynchings were by hanging or shooting, or both. However, many were of a more hideous nature - burning at the stake, maiming, dismemberment, castration, and other brutal methods of physical torture. Lynching therefore was a cruel combination of racism and sadism, which was utilized primarily to sustain the caste system in the South. Many white people believed that Negroes could only be controlled by fear. To them, lynching was seen as the most effective means of control.
snip:
In the decade immediately preceding World War I, a pattern of racial violence began to emerge in which white mob assaults were directed against entire Black communities. These race riots were the product of white society's desire to maintain its superiority over Blacks, vent its frustrations in times of distress, and attack those least able to defend themselves. In these race riots, white mobs invaded Black neighborhoods, beat and killed large numbers of Blacks and destroyed Black property. In most instances, Blacks fought back and there were many casualties on both sides, though most of the dead were Black.
Gunnar Myrdal opposed the use of the term "riots" to describe these interracial conflicts. He preferred to call this phenomena a terrorization or massacre, and (considered) it a magnified, or mass, lynching. Race riots occurred in both the North and South, but were more characteristic of the North. They were primarily urban phenomena, while lynching was primarily a rural phenomenon.
http://www.yale.edu/ynhti/curriculum/units/1979/2/79.02.04.x.html#e
If you're not angry yet, you're not and haven't been paying attention.
= new reply since forum marked as read
Wish it were required reading for all the american 'privileged' here and other places who think things are not as bad as they are, in race relations, in this country, today. Hate this deep and of such a continuing nature, will never be eradicated unless the human evolves and that's just not happening anymore. 
