Terror Lynching: When soldier refused to remove his army uniform-savage mob exacted their punishment [View all]

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The report argues that atrocities carried out against African Americans during this period were akin to terrorism, and that lynchings were a tool to “enforce racial subordination and segregation”.

In 1931, the Alabama governor called the National Guard to the Scottsboro jail to protect a group of young black men who he believed might be lynched after being accused of raping two white girls. Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis



Equal Justice Initiative report reveals history of racial violence and finds at least 700 more lynchings than previously recorded in southern states

In 1919, a black soldier returned home to Blakely, Georgia, having survived the horrors of the first world war only to face the terrors of a white mob that awaited him in the Jim Crow-era south. When the soldier, William Little, refused to remove his army uniform, the savage mob exacted their punishment.

Little was just one of 3,959 African Americans who were brutally and often publicly killed across the southern states between the end of the Reconstruction era and the second world war, which is at least 700 more lynchings in these states than previously recorded, according to a report released on Tuesday by the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI). The authors’ inventory of the nearly 4,000 victims of what the report calls “terror lynchings” reveals a history of racial violence more extensive and more brutal than initially reported.

Many of the victims were, like Little, killed for minor transgressions against segregationist mores – or simply for demanding basic human rights or refusing to submit to unfair treatment. And though the names and faces of many who were lynched have slipped from the pages of history, their deaths, the report argues, have left an indelible mark on race relations in America.

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The report, titled Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror, is the result of nearly five years of investigation by EJI, a nonprofit organization based in Montgomery, Alabama, into lynchings that occurred in 12 southern states between 1877 and 1950. It explores how the legacy of racial inequality in America was shaped and complicated by these violent decades, which saw thousands of African American men, women and children killed by “terror lynchings”, horrific acts of violence inflicted on racial minorities.

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http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/feb/10/history-of-lynchings-and-racial-violence-continues-to-haunt-us