Find Magazine Articles on Old Lynchings. Our Site Has Information from Old Magazine and Old Newspaper Articles on Lynchings.
The 1923 lynching of James Thomas Scott was precipitated by a case of mistaken identity. Falsely accused of rape, the World War I veteran was dragged from jail by a mob and hanged from a bridge before 1,000 onlookers. The Time journalist wrote:
“What they did, some people call murder; others, lynching.”
A report from The New York Times stated that, relative to the population, 1912 saw a drop in the number of lynchings. Included in this brief is a record of lynchings that occurred between the years 1885 – 1912.-from Amazon:
Here is a Crisis Magazine summary of the all the various lynchings that had been recorded in the United States between the years 1885 through 1918. Additional lists are provided that give an account of the participating states for the year 1918, the genders of the victims and the racial group to which they belonged.
Click here for the Ku Klux Klan Archive.
Whether it was due to the urgency of the war or whether it was simply business as usual on Capitol hill, who knows – but ever since he came to Washington in 1929 Representative Joseph Gavagan (D., NYC: 1892 – 1968) tried numerous times to get his anti-lynching legislation through Congress. In April of 1937 he succeeded in getting one of his anti-lynching bills passed (277 to 118) – but the Southern Democrats saw to it that he wouldn’t get an encore performance in ’42; this was his last attempt, he retired from the House that same year.
Here is a very brief study of U.S. congressional anti-lynching legislation spanning the years from 1901 through 1922.
Click here for the Ku Klux Klan Archive.
Attached is a two page account of the sixty-four lynchings that took place during 1918; the names of the victims, dates, locations, and their alleged violations. There is no mention made concerning how the data was collected.
According to THE CRISES records there were 64 Negroes, 5 of whom were Negro women, and four white men, lynched in the United States during the year 1918, as compared with 224 persons lynched and killed in mob violence during 1917, 44 of whom were lynchings of Negroes…
A digest concerning the thoughts of Tuskegee Institutes’s Robert R. Moton (1867 – 1940) and his reflections on the 1919 lynchings. Principal Moton pointed out that lynching served as the primary cause for the northerly migration of the African-Americans and was creating a labor shortage that would in no way benefit the economies of the Southern states. He stated that more and more Whites were recognizing the injustice of the crime and taking measures to actively oppose it. Seven influential Southern newspapers were named that had recently condemned lynching.
This small column from the pages of THE NEW REPUBLIC reported that women from five Southern states had gathered together in 1922 intending to pass a set of resolutions that would remedy one aspect of the Negro question (an illusive phrase that meant lynching). The attached article remarked that these women
…feel a deep sense of appreciation for the chivalry of men who would give their lives for the purity and safety of the women of their own race, yet They wish to bring about a state of public opinion which will compel the protection and purity of both races.
Four paragraphs tallying up the number of lynchings that took place throughout the course of 1934. The study was compiled by the Department of Records and Research of the Tuskegee Institute, which also compared the amount to the number of lynchings that took place during the previous four years.
Fifteen people, all Negroes, were lynched during 1934…Mississippi led in the number of lynchings, six; Florida and Louisiana came next with two each; and one each was recorded for Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Texas.
Figures were presented at the National Lynching Conference showing that in the last thirty years 3,224 persons have been killed by lynching, 2,834 of them in Southern states which once were slave-holding.
