Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019

Lynching is the crime of murdering someone—often by hanging—without a trial, for an offense that is unproven and often false. Lynching is the primary means of terror employed by racists throughout Four Hundred Years and particularly in the post-war South. In the five years depicted in the essay The Great Migration, “An African American was being lynched every four days somewhere in the American South” (278). One of the most horrific examples may be that of Jesse Washington, who was tortured, castrated, and burned alive before a massive, jolly crowd who gathered to watch his torment and execution.

The specter of lynching occurs throughout the book, even when it is no longer as pervasive a threat. During the Anita Hill hearings, Clarence Thomas calls the bad publicity, “A high-tech lynching for uppity Blacks” (362). He purposefully invokes one of the most heinous symbols of the Jim Crow era to sway sentiment away from Hill towards himself. Wells-Barnett writes, “Lynching was not about protecting Southern womanhood but had everything to do with shoring up white men’s social, economic, and political power—in other words, white male supremacy” (256).

The 2012 shooting death of Trayvon Martin is also invoked by many as a modern-day lynching, given that the shooter, George Zimmerman, was acquitted.