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[[Image:Lynching-of-lige-daniels.jpg|right|thumb|300px|Postcard depicting the lynching of Lige Daniels, Center, Texas, USA, August 3, 1920. The back reads, "This was made in the court yard in Center, Texas. He is a 16 year old Black boy. He killed Earl's grandma. She was Florence's mother. Give this to Bud. From Aunt Myrtle." As discussed in the article, lynchings were often motivated by economics, or were retaliations for violations of [[Jim Crow etiquette]], with false accusations of murder made in order to justify them.]]
[[Lynching]], in the United States, has influenced and been influenced by the major social conflicts in the country, revolving around the [[American frontier]], [[Reconstruction_era_%28United_States%29|Reconstruction]], and the [[Civil rights|civil rights movement]]. Originally, ''lynching'' meant any extra-judicial punishment, including [[tarring and feathering]] and [[exile|running out of town]], but during the 19th century in the [[United States]], it began to be used to refer specifically to [[murder]], usually by [[hanging]].
On the American frontier, where the power of the police and the army was tenuous, lynching was seen by some as a positive alternative to complete lawlessness. In the [[Reconstruction_era_%28United_States%29|Reconstruction-era South]], lynching of blacks was used, especially by the first [[Ku Klux Klan]], as a tool for reversing the social changes brought on by Federal occupation. This type of racially motivated lynching continued in the [[Jim Crow law|Jim Crow era]] as a way of enforcing subservience and preventing economic competition, and into the twentieth century as a method of resisting the [[Civil rights|civil rights movement]].
More recently, ''lynching'' has come to have a contemporary informal use as a label for social vilification, particularly in the [[media]], and particularly of [[African-American]]s.
== Early history ==
[[Image:Tarfeather.jpg|right|thumb|200px|1774 [[Britain|British]] [[propaganda]] print depicting the [[tarring and feathering]] of [[Boston]] [[Commissioner]] of [[Customs]] [[John Malcolm]] four weeks after the [[Boston Tea Party]].]]
Lynching began with [[vigilance committee]]s which formed to keep order during the [[American Revolutionary War|Revolutionary War]]. Lynching was named either for Colonel [[Charles Lynch]], who practiced lynching circa [[1782]] to deal with [[Loyalist (American Revolution)|Tories]] and criminal elements, or more likely for Captain [[William Lynch]] (1742-1820) of [[Pittsylvania County, Virginia]], who practiced lynching circa [[1780]]. The use of lynching as a method to maintain the social order was referred to as [[lynch law]]; at this time lynchings as executions were rare. After the war, as the nation expanded so did the practice of lynching, and lynching gradually became more brutal.
== Lynching on the frontier ==
In the period before the [[American Civil War|Civil War]], lynching as ''ad hoc'' law-enforcement spread west along with the American [[frontier]]. Particularly in unorganized territories or sparsely-settled states, security was often provided by a [[United States Marshal Service|federal marshal]] who might, despite the appointment of deputies, be hours or even days away by horse. As the frontier closed, local law enforcement improved, and lynching of common criminals declined. The widespread use of [[capital punishment]] by [[hanging]] gradually became associated with the word ''lynching'' (helped by the wordplay on [[linch]]). Lynching in the [[American Old West]] often referred to a legally-sanctioned hanging. Many of the other characteristics were also present, such as [[mob action]] in the sanctioned form of a [[posse]], and public attendance.
== Reconstruction ==
[[Image:Misissippi ku klux.jpg|left|200px|thumb|Three Ku Klux Klan members captured in [[Tishomingo County, Mississippi|Tishomingo County]], [[Mississippi]] in September 1871.]]
After the [[American Civil War|Civil War]], lynching became particularly associated with the killing of African Americans in the southern [[United States]]. There, it can be seen as a latter-day expression of the [[slave patrol]]s, the bands of poor whites who policed the slaves and pursued escapees. Lynching with a racial tone was not limited to the South; the [[New York Draft Riots]] were sparked in part by job competition between [[Irish-American]] immigrants and free blacks, and during the riots 11 blacks were murdered, with many more beaten, and their property destroyed. The riots led to a brief exodus of blacks from New York, and helped establish [[Harlem]] as the center of black society in the city.{{ref|draftriots}}
The first heavy period of racially oriented lynching occurred in the southern [[United States]] between [[1868]] and [[1871]]. It was essentially a purge of black and white [[Republicans]] by white [[Democrats]]. Whites had decided to prevent the ratification of new constitutions by preventing people from voting. Failed attempts at terrorization led to a massacre during the 1868 elections, when the [[Ku Klux Klan]] systematically murdered around 1000 voters across various southern states ranging from [[South Carolina]] to [[Arkansas]]. The Klan sometimes used murder in its lynchings, but sometimes whipped its victims, to remind them of their former status as slaves.{{ref|whipping}} After years of terror by the Klan, President [[Ulysses S. Grant]] and [[Congress]] passed the Anti KKK Act of 1871. This permitted authorities to use [[martial law]] in places like South Carolina, where the Klan was the strongest. At about this time the Klan dissipated, but the US would see a reemergence in the early 20th century.
[[Image:lynching-1889.jpg|right|thumb|170px|Lynching victim, 1889]]
==1877 to World War II==
=== Enforcing Jim Crow ===
A second major period of lynching in the [[South]] began after [[1876]].
[[Congress]] had housed many southern [[Republicans]] who sought to protect black voting rights by using federal troops. A congressional deal to elect [[Rutherford B. Hayes]] as President included a pledge to end Reconstruction in the South. The [[Redeemers]], white racists that often included [[White Cappers]] and [[Ku Klux Klan]] members, began to break any political power that blacks had gained during Reconstruction. Blacks were targeted for terror and lynching became very public. Another reaction against Reconstruction was the creation of the [[Jim Crow law|Jim Crow laws]] beginning in the 1890's. Terror and lynching was used to enforce both these formal laws and a variety of [[Jim Crow etiquette|unwritten rules of conduct]] meant to assert white domination. This period drew to a close in the early 1940’s with the rise of black political power in the northern cities, the advent of the 2nd World War and the early stages of the [[civil rights movement]]. One of the last lynchings, the murder of [[Emmett Till]] in Money, Mississippi in 1955, was a major catalyst to the civil rights movement in the south as well as the north.In the period from 1882 to 1930 over 538 documented lynchings occured in Mississippi, the most of any state in the Union.
===The new Klan===
In 1915, three closely related events occurred: the lynching of [[Leo Frank]], the release of the film [[The Birth of a Nation]], and the reorganization of the [[Ku Klux Klan]] with a new emphasis on violence against immigrants, Jews, and Catholics.
[[Image:LeoFranknewspaper.jpg|right|thumb|Cover of the ''Atlanta Constitution'' with Leo Frank]]
The [[1915]] murder of factory manager [[Leo Frank]], an [[United States|American]] [[Jew]], was one of the more notorious lynchings of a non-African-American. In sensationalistic newspaper accounts, Frank was accused of fantastic sexual crimes, and of the murder of a [[Mary Phagan]], a girl employed by his factory. He was convicted of murder after a questionable trial in Georgia (the judge asked that Frank and his counsel not be present when the verdict was announced due to the violent mob of people in the court house). His appeals failed (Supreme court justice [[Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.|Oliver Wendell Holmes]] dissented, condemning the intimidation of the jury as failing to provide due process of law). The governor then commuted his sentence to life imprisonment, but a mob calling itself the Knights of Mary Phagan kidnapped Frank from the prison farm, and lynched him. Ironically, the evidence in the murder actually pointed to the factory's black janitor, Jim Conley, who had a criminal record, was seen washing a bloody shirt, and repeatedly changed his story. Many black Americans believed that the extensive national attention focused on Frank as an "American [[Dreyfus affair|Dreyfus]]"{{ref|dreyfus}} would never have happened if Frank had been black.
The Frank trial was used skillfully by Georgia politician and publisher [[Tom Watson]] as a strategy to build support for the reorganization of the [[Ku Klux Klan]], with a new [[anti-Jewish]], [[anti-Catholic]], and [[anti-immigrant]] slant. The new Klan was inaugurated in 1915 at a mountaintop meeting attended by aging members of the original Klan, along with members of the Knights of Mary Phagan. The recreation of the Klan was also greatly aided by [[D. W. Griffith]]'s 1915 film ''[[The Birth of a Nation]]'', which glorified the Klan. The film resonated strongly with many southerners who believed Frank to be guilty, because they saw an analogy between Mary Phagan and the film's character Flora, a young virgin who throws herself off a cliff to avoid being raped by the black character Gus, described as "a renegade, a product of the vicious doctrines spread by the carpetbaggers."
[[Image:Lynching-of-jesse-washington.jpg|left|thumb|300px|right|A postcard showing the burned body of Jesse Washington, Waco, Texas, 1916. Washington was a 17-year-old retarded farmhand who had confessed to raping and killing a white woman. He was castrated, mutilated, and burned alive by a cheering mob that included the mayor and the chief of police. An observer wrote that "Washington was beaten with shovels and bricks. . .[he] was castrated, and his ears were cut off. A tree supported the iron chain that lifted him above the fire. . . Wailing, the boy attempted to climb up the skillet hot chain. For this, the men cut off his fingers." This image is from a postcard, which said on the back, "This is the barbeque we had last night. My picture is to the left with a cross over it. Your son, Joe."]]
=== Social characteristics ===
There were often two motives for lynchings in the United States. The first was the social aspect--righting some social wrong or perceived social wrong (such as a violation of [[Jim Crow law|Jim Crow etiquette]]). The second was the economic aspect. For example, upon successful lynching of a black farmer or immigrant merchant, the land would be available and the market opened for white Americans. A black journalist, [[#Anti-lynching movement|Ida B. Wells]], discovered in the 1890s that black lynch victims were accused of rape or attempted rape only about one-third of the time. The most prevalent accusation was murder or attempted murder, followed by a list of infractions that included verbal and physical aggression, spirited business competition and independence of mind.{{ref|whowaslynched}}
Lynch mobs enforced the racist social order through beatings, cutting off fingers, burning down houses, and/or destroying the crops of African-Americans. [[Murder]] was a common form of lynch mob "justice", sometimes with the complicity of law-enforcement authorities who participated directly or held victims in jail until a mob formed to carry out the murder. Hanging was the most common form of lynching but some victims were beaten, burned, stabbed, shot, or slowly tortured to death.
[[Image:Lynching-of-will-james.jpg|left|thumb|330px|The circus-style lynching of Will James, Cairo, Illinois, 1909.]]
Most often, victims were lynched by a small group of white [[vigilante]]s late at night. Sometimes, however, lynchings became mass spectacles with a circus atmosphere. Children often attended these public lynchings, which anti-lynching advocates saw as a form of indoctrination. A large lynching might be announced beforehand in the newspaper, and there were cases in which a lynching was started early so that a newspaper reporter could make his deadline. It was common for postcards to be sold depicting lynchings, typically allowing a newpaper photographer to make some extra money. These postcards became popular enough to be an embarrassment to the government, and the postmaster officially banned them in 1908. However, the lynching postcards continued to exist through the 1930's.
Many lynchings were carried out with full participation by law enforcement and government officials. Police might jail a lynching target for his own safety, then release him into a situation where a lynch mob could easily, and quietly, complete their deed. Fewer than 1% of lynch mob participants were ever convicted. Even in the rare cases in which the murderers were tried, they were often acquitted by all-white juries in the southeastern United States. For example, the trial for the murder of [[Emmett Till]] resulted in an acquittal, with the jurors reporting than they had taken a "soda break" in order to stretch their deliberations to over an hour.
[[Image:duluth-lynching-postcard.jpg|left|thumb|300px|Postcard of the Duluth lynching.]]
More than 85% of the estimated 5000 lynchings in the post-Civil War period occurred in the southern US states, but the problem was nationwide, peaking in [[1892]] when 161 African-Americans were lynched.
Not all racially motivated lynchings in the United States took place in the South. One such incident occurred in [[Duluth, Minnesota]] on [[June 15]], [[1920]], when three young African-American travelers were dragged from their jail cells (where they were confined after being accused of raping a white woman) and lynched by a mob believed to number more than one thousand. The event became the subject of a non-fiction book, ''The Lynchings in Duluth'', published in [[2000]], by Michael Fedo.
[[Image:viola-liuzzo.jpg|thumb|right|200px|Anthony and Viola Liuzzo, 1949.]]
Since lynchings were often carried out on the pretext of protecting white women, e.g., from rape by black men, in [[1930]], white women formed the [[Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching]] to repudiate the claim that this was the true purpose of lynching{{ref|southernwomen}} Further doubt was cast on this claim in 1965, when [[Viola Liuzzo]], a white mother of five who had been raised in the South, was murdered by [[Ku Klux Klan]] members after she participated the civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery (see [[American Civil Rights Movement]]).
===Resistance===
[[Image:Idawells.jpg|left|thumb|120px|Ida B. Wells-Barnett led a crusade against lynching.]]
By the late 19th century, black Americans had the political experience and confidence to begin to push back against what was, in effect, a gradual decrease in civil rights. In [[1888]] the [[Tuskeegee Institute]] began to assiduously document lynchings, a practice it would continue until [[1968]]. {{ref|wexler1}} [[Ida B. Wells|Ida B. Wells-Barnett]], a black journalist, was shocked when three of her friends in [[Memphis, Tennessee]] were lynched for opening a [[grocery]] that competed with a white-owned store. Outraged, Wells-Barnett began a global anti-lynching campaign that raised awareness of the American injustice.
Some blacks, believing that the government would never protect them against lynching, fought back. During a nationwide rash of race riots in 1919, for example, a young black, Eugene Williams, paddled a raft near a Lake Michigan beach into "white territory," and drowned after being hit by a rock thrown by a young white man. Witnesses pointed out the killer to a policeman, who refused to make an arrest, and an indignant black mob attacked the officer.{{ref|chicagoriot1}} Violence broke out across the city, and while the police stood by, white mobs, many of them organized around Irish clubs, began pulling blacks at random off of trolley cars, attacking black businesses, and beating victims with baseball bats and iron bars. Blacks began to fight back, and eventually 23 blacks and 15 whites were killed.{{ref|chicagoriot}}
[[Image:chicago-race-riot.jpg|frame|none|A white gang looking for blacks during the Chicago race riots of 1919.]]
By the 1930s, the rate of lynchings was reduced to ten per year in southern US states. With the election of [[Franklin Delano Roosevelt|Franklin D. Roosevelt]] as president in 1932, anti-lynching advocates such as [[Mary McLeod Bethune]] and [[Walter Francis White]] who had campaigned for Roosevelt were hoping for progress toward ending lynching. Senators [[Robert F. Wagner]] and [[Edward P. Costigan]] drafted a bill (the Costigan-Wagner bill) to require local authorities to protect prisoners from lynch mobs. A lynching in [[Miami, Florida]] affected the political atmosphere of the bill. On [[July 19]], [[1935]], Rubin Stacy, a homeless African-American farmer, went knocking on doors begging for food. Frightened, Marion Jones complained to the authorities. Six Dade county deputies were bringing Stacy to jail when he was killed by a lynch mob. Because Stacy's original actions were so innocuous, lynching opponents considered Stacy's murder an egregious example. Nevertheless, Roosevelt did not support the bill, believing that it would cost him the votes of Southern whites, and thus the [[U.S. presidential election, 1936|1936 election]]. In 1939, Roosevelt did create the Civil Rights Section of the Justice Department, which made efforts to combat lynching, but failed to win any convictions until 1946.{{ref|wexler2}}
In the 1930's, communist organizations, including a legal defense organization called the [[International Labor Defense]] (ILD), became active in the anti-lynching cause (see [[The Communist Party and African-Americans]]). The ILD defended the [[Scottsboro Boys]], and three black men accused of rape in Tuscaloosa in 1933. In the Tuscaloosa case, two of the defendants were lynched under circumstances that suggested police complicity, and the ILD lawyers themselves narrowly escaped lynching. Black Americans in general remained unreceptive toward communism, however, and the ILD lawyers aroused passionate hatred among many southerners. In a typical remark to an investigator, a white Tuscaloosan said, "For New York Jews to butt in and spread communistic ideas is too much."{{ref|ild}}
==World War II to the present==
[[Image:fbi-lynching-poster.jpg|thumb|200px|right|FBI poster asking for information in the 1946 lynching at Moore's Ford Bridge, Georgia.]]
===Federal action===
After [[World War II]], the federal government began to take its first productive actions against lynching.
In 1946, the Civil Rights Section of the Justice Department gained its first successful prosecution against a lyncher. Florida constable Tom Crews was sentenced to a $1000 fine and a year in prison for civil rights violations in the killing of a black farm worker.
In 1946, a mob of white men shot and killed two young black men and two young black women near Moore's Ford Bridge in Walton County, Georgia. The savagery of this lynching shocked the nation, and was a key factor that led President Truman to make civil rights a top priority.{{ref|wexler3}} In 1947, the Truman administration published a report titled "To Secure These Rights," which advocated, among other civil rights reforms, making lynching a federal crime. Truman had paid a $10 membership fee to join the [[Ku Klux Klan]] in 1924, but at a meeting with a Klan officer arranged by Truman's friend, Klansman Edgar Hinde, the Klan officer demanded that Truman pledge not to hire any Catholics if he was reelected as county judge; Truman refused, because many of the men he had commanded in World War II had been Catholic, and his membership fee was returned,{{ref|trumanklan}} and he was later much reviled by the Klan for his civil rights activities.
===Lynching, red-baiting, and the cold war===
[[image:robeson10.jpg|left|150px|thumb|Paul Robeson]]
In the period after World War II, with the beginning of the Cold War, the Soviet Union made effective use of the existence of lynching in the U.S. as propaganda, and lynching began to be seen as an embarrassment to the U.S., which was now becoming a global power. [[Paul Robeson]], in a tense meeting with Truman in 1946, urged him to take action against lynching, and began to be attacked in the press for his communism. In 1951, the [[Civil Rights Congress]] (CRC) made a presentation on lynching to the United Nations titled "We Charge Genocide," which argued that the federal government, by its failure to act against lynching, was guilty of [[genocide]] under Article II of the [[Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide|UN Genocide Convention]].
Because of the Soviet exploitation of lynching for propaganda purposes, there was a tendency in right-wing government circles to portray anti-lynching groups as communist, and although there was sometimes some truth to these claims (Robeson was a communist, and the [[Civil Rights Congress|CRC]] had been created by a merger of the communist [[International Labor Defense|ILD]] with another group), the label was applied indiscriminately. Even [[Albert Einstein]] was branded a communist sympathizer by the [[FBI]], because of his membership in such "communist-front" organizations as Robeson's [[American Crusade Against Lynching]].{{ref|einstein}} In one particularly egregious example, the FBI spread false information in the press that lynching victim [[Viola Liuzzo]] was a member of the Communist Party, and had abandoned her five children in order to have sexual relationships with African Americans involved in the civil rights movement.{{ref|liuzzosmear}}
===The civil rights movement===
By the [[Fifties]], the [[American Civil Rights Movement|civil rights movement]] was gaining momentum. A case that sparked public outrage was that of [[Emmett Till]], a fourteen-year-old Chicagoan who was spending the summer with relatives in the South, and was mutilated and killed for allegedly having whistled at a white woman.
In [[1964]], [[Mississippi Civil Rights Workers Murders|three civil rights workers were lynched]] by white racists in [[Neshoba County, Mississippi]]. [[Michael Schwerner]] (24), [[Andrew Goodman]] (20) of [[New York]], and [[James Chaney]] (22) from [[Meridian, Mississippi]], members of the [[Congress of Racial Equality]] (CORE), were dedicated to non-violent direct action against racial discrimination. They disappeared in June of that year while investigating the arson of a black church being used as a "Freedom School". Their bodies were found six weeks later in a partially constructed dam near [[Philadelphia, Mississippi]]. In 2005, 80-year-old [[Edgar Ray Killen]] was convicted of manslaughter for the killings, and sentenced to 60 years in [[prison]].
===After the civil rights movement===
[[Image:Lynching-of-michael-donald.jpg|thumb|200px|The lynching of Michael Donald, 1981.]]Although lynchings became much more rare in the era following the [[civil rights movement]], they do still occur sometimes. In 1981, KKK members randomly picked out a nineteen-year-old black man, [[Michael Donald]], and murdered him in retaliation for a jury's acquittal of a black man accused of murdering a police officer. The Klansmen were eventually caught, prosecuted, and convicted, and a seven million dollar judgment in a subsequent civil suit bankrupted a subgroup of the Klan, the United Klans of America.{{ref|donald}}
On [[June 13]], [[2005]], the [[United States Senate]] formally apologized for its failure in previous decades to enact a federal anti-lynching law, all of which fell victim to [[filibuster|filibusters]] by powerful Southern senators. Prior to the vote, Senator [[Mary Landrieu]] noted, "There may be no other injustince in American history for which the Senate so uniquely bears responsibility." [http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/13/AR2005061301720.html] The resolution was passed on a voice vote with 80 senators cosponsoring, causing some to point out that the remaining 20 did not have to take a position on the matter through either cosponsorship or a recorded vote in favor or against. The resolution expresses "the deepest sympathies and most solemn regrets of the Senate to the descendants of victims of lynching, the ancestors of whom were deprived of life, human dignity and the constitutional protections accorded all citizens of the United States."
== Statistics ==
The following table gives the number of lynchings in each decade from 1865 to 1965:{{ref|lynching-numbers}}
{|
| 1865-1869
| 1510
|-
| 1870-1879
| 654
|-
| 1880-1889
| 184
|-
| 1890-1899
| 1234
|-
| 1900-1909
| 820
|-
| 1910-1919
| 759
|-
| 1920-1929
| 490
|-
| 1930-1939
| 149
|-
| 1940-1949
| 76
|-
| 1950-1959
| 40
|-
| 1960-1965
| 54
|}
== Popular culture ==
=== Famous fictional treatments ===
In [[The Virginian (novel)|The Virginian]], a seminal novel that helped helped to create the genre of [[American Old West|Western]] [[novels]] in the U.S., the protagonist participates in the lynching of an admitted cattle thief, who had been his close friend, during the [[Johnson County War]]. The lynching is represented as a necessary response to the government's corruption and lack of action, but the protagonist feels it to be a horrible duty. He is especially stricken by the bravery with which the thief faces his fate, and the heavy burden it places on his heart forms the emotional core of the story.
In [[To Kill a Mockingbird]], Tom Robinson, a black man wrongfully accused of rape, narrowly escapes lynching because of his lawyer's bravery, and the disarmingly innocent behavior of the lawyer's daughter. The lawyer tells his daughter that he isn't angry at the mob, because once the feeling of mob violence gets into people, they don't act normally. Robinson is later killed trying escape from jail, after having been wrongfully convicted.
In [[Fury (1936 movie)|Fury]], German expatriate [[Fritz Lang]] depicts a lynch mob hanging innocent men, apparently modeled on a 1933 lynching in [[San Jose, California]] that was captured on [[newsreel]] footage and in which [[Governor of California]] [[James Rolph]] refused to intervene.
In [[The Ox-Bow Incident]], two drifters are drawn into a posse formed to find the murderer of a local man, and suspicion centers on three innocent cattle [[rustler]]s who are then lynched, deeply affecting the drifters. The novel was filmed in [[1943]] as a wartime defense of American values versus the characterization of [[Third Reich|Nazi Germany]] as mob rule.
==="Strange Fruit"===
Among artistic works referring to lynching is the [[Billie Holiday]] song "[[Strange Fruit]]", written by [[Abel Meeropol]] in [[1939]]:
:''Southern trees bear strange fruit, blood on the leaves and blood at the roots. Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze, strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees. Pastoral scene of the gallant south, the bulging eyes and the twisted mouth. Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh. Then the sudden smell of burning flesh. Here is fruit for the crows to pluck, for the rain to gather, for the wind to suck, for the sun to rot, for the trees to drop, here is a strange and bitter crop.''
The stark, disturbing lyrics were rejected by Holiday's label, but she recorded it independently; the song became an anthem for the anti-lynching movement which joined the groundswell of the [[American civil rights movement]]. A documentary, also titled ''[http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/strangefruit/ Strange Fruit]'', has aired on U.S. television.
The song has been performed by other artists, including [[Nina Simone]] and [[Cassandra Wilson]]. It was also remixed by the British artist [[Tricky]].
=== Clarence Thomas ===
The word ''lynching'' returned to popular culture with the nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court of [[Clarence Thomas]], an African-American government attorney nominated by the [[Republican]] President [[George H.W. Bush]] and supported by Republican Senators. His nomination received heavy criticism from [[Democrat]]ic Senators on the [[United States Senate Judiciary Committee|Judiciary Committee]], and in particular allegations of [[sexual harassment]] of a female subordinate, [[Anita Hill]], while he was head of the [[Equal Employment Opportunity Commission]]. Frustrated with the detailed and embarrassing questioning, Thomas appeared before the committee and shot back a prepared statement:
:''Mr. Chairman, I am a victim of this process and my name has been harmed, my integrity has been harmed, my character has been harmed, my family has been harmed, my friends have been harmed. There is nothing this committee, this body or this country can do to give me my good name back, nothing. I will not provide the rope for my own lynching or for further humiliation.''
The phrase was repeated later that same day:
:''There was an FBI investigation. This is not an opportunity to talk about difficult matters privately or in a closed environment. This is a circus. It is a national disgrace. And from my standpoint, as a black American, as far as I am concerned, it is a high-tech lynching for uppity-blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas, and it is a message that, unless you kow-tow to an old order, this is what will happen to you, you will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U.S. Senate, rather than hung from a tree.''
Democrats viewed this as a calculated tactic to make them appear racist for opposing him, but Republicans defended Thomas vigorously. Thomas went on to successful confirmation, and the phrase ''high-tech lynching'' is still heard in this context.
== See also ==
[[Tarring and feathering]]
== External links ==
* [http://college.hmco.com/history/readerscomp/rcah/html/ah_055200_lynching.htm Houghton Mifflin: The Reader's Companion to American History - Lynching]
* [http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-lyn1.htm Origin of the word Lynch]
* [http://academic.evergreen.edu/p/pfeiferm/Iowa.html Lynchings in the State of Iowa]
* [http://bad.eserver.org/reviews/2000/2000-4-7-7.53PM.html ''Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America'', James Allen et al]
* [http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0944092691/ref=sib_dp_pop_fc/104-5844148-3816719?%5Fencoding=UTF8&p=S001#reader-link ''Without Sanctuary'', front cover]
== Further reading ==
* Stewart E. Tolnay and E.M. Beck, ''A Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882-1930'', Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992.
==Notes==
# {{note|draftriots}} [http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/317749.html http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/317749.html], retrieved June 25, 2005.
# {{note|whipping}} Dray, 2002.
# {{note|dreyfus}} Dray, 2002.
# {{note|whowaslynched}} http://www.nellpainter.com/nell/cv/articles/32_WhoWasLynched.html
# {{note|southernwomen}} http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/margins-to-centre/2005-February/000201.html
# {{note|wexler1}} Editorial by Laura Wexler, "A Sorry History: Why an Apology From the Senate Can't Make Amends," Washington Post, Sunday, June 19, 2005, page B1; http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/18/AR2005061800075.html
# {{note|chicagoriot1}} Chicago Daily Tribune, http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/4975/
# {{note|chicagoriot}} Dray, 2002.
# {{note|wexler2}} Wexler, 2003.
# {{note|ild}} Dray, 2002.
# {{note|wexler3}} Wexler, 2003.
# {{note|trumanklan}} Wade, 1987, p. 196, gives essentially this version of the events, but implies that the meeting was a regular Klan meeting, rather than an individual meeting between Truman and a Klan organizer. An interview with Hinde at the Truman Library's web site ([http://www.trumanlibrary.org/oralhist/hindeeg.htm http://www.trumanlibrary.org/oralhist/hindeeg.htm], retrieved June 26, 2005) portrays it as a one-on-one meeting at the Hotel Baltimore with a Klan organizer named Jones. Truman's biography, written by his daughter (Truman, 1973), agrees with Hinde's version, but does not mention the $10 initiation fee; the same biography reproduces a telegram from O.L. Chrisman stating that reporters from the Hearst papers had questioned him about Truman's past with the Klan, and that he had seen Truman at a Klan meeting, but that "if he ever became a member of the Klan I did not know it."
# {{note|einstein}} Fred Jerome, ''The Einstein File'', St. Martin's Press, 2000; foia.fbi.gov/foiaindex/einstein.htm
# {{note|liuzzosmear}} Detroit News, September 30, 2004; http://www.detnews.com/2004/metro/0409/30/c01-289311.htm
# {{note|lynching-numbers}} data compiled from [http://users.bestweb.net/~rg/lynching_century.htm http://users.bestweb.net/~rg/lynching_century.htm], retrieved June 26, 2005
==References==
* Dray, Philip. ''At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America'', New York: Random House, 2002.
* Truman, Margaret. ''Harry S. Truman''. New York: William Morrow and Co. (1973).
* Wade, Wyn Craig. ''The Fiery Cross: The Ku Klux Klan in America''. New York: Simon and Schuster (1987).
* Wexler, Laura. ''Fire in a Canebrake: The Last Mass Lynching in America'', New York: Scribner, 2003.
::An account of the 1946 Moore's Ford Bridge lynchings.
[[Category:Murder]]
[[Category:U.S. civil rights history]]
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