Lynching Keyword Researched Based Article
When anyone hears the word lynching, two images come to mind i.e., Jesus Christ hanging on a cross, and African Americans lynched on trees in the late 19th and 20th century. Although, the word “lynching” has historic and religious significance, yet it still relates to the modernized world.
The origin of the word and its evolution seems to resonate differently with people, in context of race, religion, and politics. However, the in-depth analysis of the word transcends the boundaries of above-stated disciplines, and should be implicated to all the past horrors and on-going practices that incurs tyranny and violence against human beings.
According to Library of Congress (2022), the word originates from Colonel Charles Lynch in 1780, where he used extra-legal methods, mostly whipping to punish Tories and criminals, without legal and court sanctions to uphold self-righteous justice, and thus, ‘Lynch Law’ came to be. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) defines ‘Lynch Law’ as a mob constituting of two more persons, killing someone without any legal sanctions to pursue their own version of Justice (Giddings, 2022).
Before establishing the definition of lynching with African American aspect, it’s imperative to discuss the historical and religious aspects of lynching to further expand on the word’s evolution. From religious and historical perspective, lynching can be best described by two events, i.e., the story of Exodus and Jesus Christ’s sacrifice.
The story of Exodus has significance for Judaism, Christianity and Islam, as the story is cited in their holy scriptures, where oppressed and enslaved Israelites are freed from cruel pharaoh by Moses, who led them to the promised land (Mark, 2016). Before exodus, Israelites were lower-class citizens and slaves, who were harshly treated by Egyptians.
They worked tirelessly for the Egyptians, whipped for amusement and lacking in strength, without any legal reasons. They were denied the basic civil rights as the world enjoys now. The other excerpt of religion is the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, which is the story of Roman and mob violence. Jesus Christ, as from the biblical accounts, sacrificed himself in order to save humanity by purging their sins.
Before crucifixion, Jesus Christ was tortured, publicly humiliated by the mob and roman soldiers, ultimately, lynched on a cross (Powell, 2022). Both stories resonate with African Americans, as they relate them to their past struggles and on-going tyranny of the system. Also, these stories represent the evolution of lynching in terms of punishment, death, and segregation.
An analogy is drawn by Dr. Cone from Crucifixion of Jesus Christ with respect to African Americans. Judging from the Bible story of Jesus Christ, the point was to instill fear in the followers of Jesus Christ, that they would follow the same fate, if they kept walking in the footsteps of the Jesus Christ.
Similarly, Dr. James H. Cone draws the same analogy with lynching of African Americans, where they were publicly lynched for the crowd to see, to instill fear in their hearts to withdraw any efforts for their civil rights movement (Cone, 2011). it wasn’t until 1886, that American traditions fell prey to racial stereotypes, and the real ‘lynching’ started when African Americans were hanged by the tree by American whites, especially the Ku Klux Klan.
Moreover, Paula Giddings (2022) suggests that in the struggle of civil rights movement, Lynch Law evolved to ‘Jim Crow Laws’, where African Americans were unconstitutionally, (however, legally binding) segregated to the second, or even lower-class citizenry. In this new form of lynching, African Americans were pushed towards their demise in the form of education, voting rights, housing, living standards, in order to limit their upward socio-economic mobility. Even from the excerpts from the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, we can incur that how religion was used to treat African American slaves harshly by their white Christian masters (Douglass, 1849).
Frederick Douglass spoke of lynching as an abhorrent crime against the whole race, not and individual, and “lynchers” didn’t consider that black men had any right, which they were bound to respect. The lynchers didn’t respect life, instead they had contempt for life, especially against the life of African American, and they saw it as a common jest (Douglass, 1894). However, lynching itself is a crime against humanity, and no individual deserve such treatment, or even death, due to his/her ethnicity, race or beliefs.
Moving to a modern era, the word lynching has evolved its meaning and ways. African Americans in United States are lynched in a legalized systematic way in the form incarceration and police brutality. Statistic suggests that one out of every ten African American is bound to go to prison.
Though, every race is susceptible of committing the same crimes, but African Americans are held accountable for even the minor offenses. Dr. James H. Cone (2011) states that more than one-third of African American between the ages of eighteen and twenty-eight are either in prison, parole, jails or waiting for their day in court.
The sheer amount of incarceration is staggering. The mob violence of the past is now converted to police brutality, where incidents like 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson (History,2014), and death by suffocation of George Floyd in 2020 by police (Hill et al., 2020). The police brutality and incarceration are indeed the evolved form of lynching, where individuals are put to death, imprisoned, and tortured with or without the legal sanctions.
From the historical, religious, and present perspective, lynching has evolved and continues to evolve. The victims are the innocent and oppressed being suffering due to racial stereotyping. In the ghettos and segregated communities, gang and gun violence take toll, due to lack of resources, education and welfare (Trace, 2021).
This all boils down to the redefining the term lynching, which is the crimes against humanity. Be that as it may, death, unjust incarceration, police brutality, racial discrimination, denial of basic rights and civil liberties etc., these are all the forms of lynching that are directed towards the weak and supposedly lower-class citizens.
The history and the current system of the world are full of facts and evidences that incurs violence and oppression against the weak. However, all the lynching resulted in massive death toll and civil unrest before simple changes are implemented, which could have been avoided in the firm place. The need of time is to address these forms of lynching to make the world better for everyone to live in.
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Works Cited
- Cone, J., 2011. The cross and the lynching tree. Ossining, New York, United States: Orbis Books.
- Douglass, Frederick, “Lynching Black People Because They Are Black,” The Christian Educator, April 1894. Courtesy of Library of Congress
- Douglass, Frederick, and William Lloyd Garrison. Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, an American slave. Boston: Anti-Slavery Office, 1849.
- Giddings, Paula. “The Origins Of Lynching Culture In The United States”. Facing History And Ourselves, 2022, https://www.facinghistory.org/resource-library/video/origins-lynching-culture-united-states.
- Hill, Evan et al. “How George Floyd Was Killed In Police Custody (Published 2020)”. Nytimes.Com, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/31/us/george-floyd-investigation.html.
- History. “Michael Brown Is Killed By A Police Officer In Ferguson, Missouri”. HISTORY, 2014, https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/michael-brown-killed-by-police-ferguson-mo.
- LOC. “Origin Of Lynch Law”. Loc.Gov, 2022, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/97501828/. Mark, Joshua J. “Moses”. World History Encyclopedia, 2016,
- https://www.worldhistory.org/Moses/. Powell, Mark Allan. “The Crucifixion Of Jesus And The Jews”. Bibleodyssey.Org, 2022,
- https://www.bibleodyssey.org/en/passages/related-articles/crucifixion-of-jesus-and-the-jews.
