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

[Solly Mack]

7. My grandfather (born 1900) was 9 when he saw his first lynching victim.

He and a friend were walking to Dalton, GA from his home a few miles away. They wanted to go to the "city" to look around.

They came across a body hanging from a tree, all bloated and crusted with blood. He was more detailed in what he saw than I will relay. What he saw was forever etched into his memory. He was in his 70's when he told us about it. Hearing his voice you could tell he was reliving that life altering moment. That he could still see it.

My grandfather said he and his friend both pee'ed their pants and, after they could move, turned tail. They ran all the way back home and he never went to Dalton again until he was an adult. Even then he was afraid.

It was a reign of terror. Lynchings were meant to instill fear. To scare people so badly they would never speak up. Never fight back. Never demand more. To cause people to live in fear every second of their lives. To know, that on somebody else's whim, you could be brutally murdered for nothing more than existing.

My grandfather couldn't escape those feelings of paralyzing terror and he was white.

Now imagine you're a 9 year old African-American.

Even today, where all too often the rope has been replaced by the legal veneer of a policeman's gun.