Because of the different definitions of lynching, different institutions have different statistics on the number of lynchings. Taking 19 14 as an example, the figures of the three institutions that systematically record the number of lynchings published by the tasker Institute, a black vocational university founded by the famous black leader booker T Washington, are 54, 52 and 74 respectively.
Some scholars object to the view that lynching is unique to the United States, and think that lynching is a common behavior of human society, and prove with examples: as early as 1644, some scholars used the word lynching to describe the behavior of a group of French thugs attacking three government officials; 1769, in Ireland, a mob dismembered a police informant and nailed him to the prison door one by one; In China, mobs chased witches in the18th century, and thieves were burned alive in the19th century. "Private criminal law" can be traced back to the Bible, in which religious customs replaced the law. In American history, similar lynching practices began to appear very early. The early Puritans in New England used flogging when they reprimanded people who fell. In the American War of Independence, the method of lynching changed. People use tar and feathers instead of whipping, which has become a national practice. Because it was first used in patriotic behavior, it was well received. [6]
Lynching is a cruel punishment that combines racism and sadism. Most lynchings are shot or hanged by rope, or both. However, many lynchings against blacks are very bad in nature, and the executors also use physical torture such as burning, mutilation, tying to a tree and castrating. In the poem Brothers, james weldon johnson describes the tragic scene of a group of white thugs burning black people alive: "Enough, this beast must die! /hurry up! Tie him to that oak tree! /It is more resistant to burning than this delicate pine tree. /Now get the oil! Pile up around! Wait a minute! Don't pile up too fast or too high, or we will/alleviate the pain and fear on his face. /Now bring the torch! Light the oil! /The flame reached the top of the head. Ha ha! Listen to that scream! /There's a sound again! Higher than the first sound. /fetch water! Pour it up! Pour some water on the fire/lest it burn too fast. That's it! /Now let the fire light slowly again. Look at that! /He is writhing! Groans! His eyes are bulging wildly,/looking for help everywhere, it's in vain! " [7] The castration of black male genitalia is of special symbolic significance to white Americans. After the black man gained personal freedom, "the black man's genitals were cut off from him, and the mob strongly rejected the symbol of the black father and the symbol of masculinity, interrupting the privilege represented by the image of the black man's genitals, thus restoring the civil rights that the black man might obtain through dismemberment." [8]
Although the lynching thugs are white adult men, there are many women and children present, and sometimes women are instigators of action. [9] Claude MacKay called these children "future lynchings" in his poem "lynching", and they danced and cheered "with the cruelty of schadenfreude": "Hey! Pull the rope! /pull up! /White people live/Black people die. //Dude, pull,/let out a bloody cry/spin with the bodies of black children/white people die ... ". Not only ordinary whites participate in lynching, but also law enforcers-local police-often support lynching. They are either hands-on, or tolerant or indifferent to lynching. Hughes described the rudeness of the police in the poem "Extorting a Confession": "Hit me! Stab me! Force me to admit that I did it. /Blood spattered on my sweatshirt/and my brown suede shoes. //Jack-o'-lantern-like face/shrouded in a gray bonnet. //Hit me hard! Whip me! /Like a blowtorch/screaming. /Kicked three feet between my legs/Killed those children/I made them tomorrow. //The railings and floors are like Roman fireworks/soaring into the sky. //When you throw cold water on me/I will sign my name on the paper ... "When law enforcement officers are involved in lynching, blacks can only count on God. This is the theme described in Hughes' poem "Who else but God": "I looked up and saw/the man who was called the law enforcer/walking along the street/coming towards me! I thought to myself that I would be knocked down and then die/or tortured/murdered. /I prayed to God, if possible,/to save me from that man! Don't let him beat me to a pulp! /But God didn't act quickly,/Law enforcers raised sticks/drove me into hell on earth! //Now I don't understand/why God doesn't protect people/from police brutality. /Poor and dark,/I have no weapon to fight back/So who can protect me but God? " In order to suppress the people's resistance, the Qing government took over the mantle of the Ming Dynasty, and lynching in official administration became more and more serious. Zheng Banqiao, a former local official, wrote a Yuefu poem entitled "Evil lynching", which exposed the cruel scene that some local officials and their minions used torture on prisoners at will: "Officials hit people like a slap in the face. The purpose of "cutting the tendons, pulling out the marrow and pulling out the hair" and "tying the innocent seventeen or eighteen" is nothing more than "taking money from suffering" In Liu E's novel Travel Notes of Lao Can, there is such a description: Yuxian, a brutal official in Cao Zhou, Shandong Province, ignored human life. He regarded people as robbers, locked them in wooden cages without water and died in the hot sun or cold wind. To this end, he attacked the so-called "honest officials" like Yuxian, that is, "killing people is like killing thieves, and being a satrap is Rong Yuan".
If we say that Zheng Banqiao's lynching evil and Liu E's travel notes of Lao Can only reflect the darkness of official management in Qing Dynasty in literary form; However, the records in the Records of Dao County Officials and Seas written by Zhang, who served as magistrate, provincial judge and acting governor in Sichuan, Fujian and Shaanxi provinces for more than 30 years, more directly exposed the cruel suppression of the people by the rulers at that time. In November of the 27th year of Daoguang (1847), when Zhang went to Sichuan to take over as the provincial judge, he recorded the case of his predecessor Liu Yanting in his diary: "Whoever finds out the bandits' suspicion, no matter whether it is true or not, he should first blame Xiao Ban for 400, and then ask for a confession. If he gets a confession, he will shoot the prisoner in the lobby" or "take the prisoner to the East Gate Market".
Of course, the above punishment is used to deal with "bandits" cases. So, what kind of people are "bandits"? Zhang also described it as "half of the arrested people are beggars, thieves and unemployed people", but "the officials entrusted with the trial are committed to extorting confessions by torture, and they will all be punished." Therefore, Zhang, as a member of the feudal ruling group, also believes that it is not necessarily true that "bandits" were sentenced to death. He also revealed in the book that all counties in Sichuan have a "card room" that is "a hundred times more painful than prison". The "criminals" locked in the "card room" (mostly parties and witnesses in civil disputes), "those who give me bonuses every day and never see the sun all the year round ... are all killed in the province, no less than one or two every year".
Lynching is one of the most inhuman acts of domestic racial terrorism in American history, "a crime unique to American society" [1], which is a great irony to the United States, a country that has always claimed democracy and the rule of law. However, for a long time, this ugly history did not get the attention of the American people, as if it had never happened. At the beginning of 2000, James Allen, an Atlanta antique dealer, exhibited 68 photos of lynching in a small gallery in new york, which attracted an endless stream of visitors and aroused people's renewed concern about the seriousness of lynching in the United States. The New York Times published a long article to comment on this, and then published an editorial, claiming that the picture was terrible, comparable to the German Nazi Holocaust. [2]
Historically, the main targets of lynching were oppressed and discriminated African-Americans, most of whom were African-American men. There are different forms and reasons for lynching in different historical periods, but one thing remains unchanged: lynching is always or in most cases associated with sexual assault charges of black men and white women, thus forming a myth or stereotype that black Americans are artificially raped under the lynching system. Studying this phenomenon is helpful for us to understand the tragic historical fate of black Americans and the hard-won democracy in the United States, so as to dynamically look at the democratic process in the United States from the perspective of historical development.
In the United States, lynching is a social phenomenon that is difficult to define. Since people's understanding of lynching almost comes from newspaper reports, how to define lynching at first is unknown. Even today, lynching is still a term that is difficult to define clearly.
According to the records of tasker Foundation College, during the period of 1882- 1968, there were 4,743 lynchings in the United States. [1 1] As early as 1890, scholars began to conduct serious academic research on why Americans prefer lynching. Mainly put forward three theories: 1, people's sovereignty; 2. Frontier mentality; 3. Control instruments. [ 12]
We know that the Declaration of Independence, the main founding document of the United States, established the principle that "government power comes from the people, and if the people are threatened, they can take back their power". Therefore, people who advocate people's sovereignty believe that this kind of collective violence is the embodiment of people's sovereignty. The lynching in the United States has exposed a tragic flaw in the American constitutional system, which shows that Americans do not believe in law and due process. Ordinary citizens think that since they have made their own laws, they can organize people to implement them in the streets outside the legal institutions. As James F. Cutler pointed out, "Where people make laws, the legal machine is inevitably unable to control large-scale riots."
According to the frontier mentality theory, lynching most often occurs in sparsely populated areas, where not only the institutionalized law enforcement mechanism has not been generally accepted, but also an effective judicial institution has not been established. Therefore, in the western frontier areas where violence is frequent, large-scale violence has become a necessary action. This view was very popular at the end of 19 and the beginning of the 20th century, and was recognized by Supreme Court judges, Harvard University jurists and many government officials. Some people who personally participated in lynching also explained that "lack of confidence in the court" was the reason for mob lynching. The similarity between the above two views is that the weak law enforcement mechanism on the issue of black racial crimes is the reason for the proliferation of lynchings, because white Americans believe that the law is completely inapplicable to the criminal acts of members of inferior black races. In addition, these thugs have no patience with the long judicial process and despise the so-called benevolent principle of solving problems.
But the frontier theory can be easily overturned. As some scholars have pointed out, this kind of illegal violence was still prevalent in the central and western regions until the end of 19. In fact, lynchings are rare only in New England and several states in the northeast and mid-Atlantic. /kloc-In the middle of the 0/9th century, the early West and the later developing West have established effective judicature and courts, but collective violence still occurs from time to time. [13] Therefore, in the Second World War, mainstream scholars began to regard lynching as a tool for elites to control their subordinates, especially whites who thought they were superior to others to control inferior blacks. White people in the southern United States maintain their hierarchical privileges through this kind of group violence.
Middles, a famous scholar, analyzed various factors leading to lynching from the perspective of psychopathology. [14] Poverty and economic fear are considered as one of the factors. It is generally believed that the increase of lynching during and after World War I is closely related to the large-scale migration of black people and the competition it brings. There is also evidence that there is also a strong correlation between the decline in cotton prices and the increase in lynching.
White people's economic fears are also combined with social fears. They are worried that blacks will get rid of their own situation and lose control, thus endangering the social status of whites, so measures need to be taken to defend them. Walter white, a famous black social activist, had an incisive exposition on this: "lynching is not so much because of black crime, but rather a manifestation of southern whites' fear of black progress. "It is generally believed that after the First World War, many black soldiers who came back from the war (some of whom have not even taken off their military uniforms) were lynched. Their public motivation was to worry that black people serving in France would have a' wrong idea' about their social status.
The education level of southern whites is low, and the whole cultural atmosphere is also an important background factor. In addition, the religion prevailing in southern China is a narrow, intolerant and "fundamentalist" Protestant evangelical religion. After the First World War, Methodist and Baptist ministers actively participated in the revival of the Ku Klan. Few priests and religious leaders stand out against lynching.
Another important factor of lynching is the closed and isolated environment in the south and the resulting monotony of daily life in rural areas and towns. Because of the lack of healthy entertainment and boring life, lynching has become a substitute for people's pursuit of excitement.
Media support and praise are also the reasons for the rampant lynching in the United States. Mainstream American newspapers often support the appeal of white society to lynch blacks accused of crimes, or sing carols to mobs after lynching, and sometimes even announce the planned lynching place and time. The film The Birth of a Nation, which started shooting in March 2005, has a direct and significant connection with the revival of the Ku Klan in the early 20th century. Based on Thomas Dixon's novel of the same name, this film is set in the background of civil war and reconstruction, and highly praises the Klan knights on horseback, believing that they saved the American South. According to incomplete statistics, as many as 50 million people have seen this film. The film had a strong response in the south, and the audience was so excited that they shouted while watching it. Once, when the audience saw the scene of a black man chasing a white woman for rape, they even shot the black man on the screen out of control.