More than 4,000 people have been lynched in the U.S. Trump isn’t one of them.
The Washington Post
October 22, 2019
By
They hang like coffins, more than 800 steel plates suspended from the ceiling, each representing a county in the United States where a lynching took place. Engraved on the broad face of each plate are the names of the victims and the days they were lynched: “Benjamin Hart, 05.08.1887,” “Maggie House, 12.21.1918,” “Unknown, 11.20.1899.” Some plates contain dozens of names.
At the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Ala., more than 4,000 victims of racist terrorism are remembered over the heads of visitors.
On Tuesday morning, President Trump compared the House impeachment inquiry into his conduct to “a lynching,” generating a firestorm of condemnation.
Lynching is the extrajudicial murder of an untried suspect, usually by a mob and often by hanging. In the United States, 4,743 lynchings were recorded between 1882 and 1968, according to the NAACP. Of those murdered people, 3,446 were black men, women and children — about 73 percent. Research by the Equal Justice Initiative, which created the lynching memorial, found a different number of black victims: about 4,400 between 1877 and 1950.
Lynching victims were often tortured before they died, and after death their corpses frequently desecrated. Such was the case for Matthew Williams, who was lynched in Salisbury, Md., in 1931.
As The Washington Post’s DeNeen L. Brown wrote last year, Williams was accused of killing a white man over a pay dispute, which he denied. He had been shot in the leg and was in a hospital when he was tied in a straitjacket, thrown out a window and stabbed with ice picks by a mob.
They dragged him three blocks and tied a noose around his neck, taunting him and raising and lowering his body. After he had died by hanging, the mob drove his body through a black neighborhood, cutting off body parts and throwing them onto black families’ porches, shouting, “Make n----- sandwiches!”
The legacy of lynching echoes through to today. A sign marking the site where 14-year-old Emmett Till’s body was found in 1955 was shot up so many times that the newest version was made out of bulletproof material.
Sometimes, the white mob took photos to sell souvenir postcards. You can view the postcards showing the 1916 lynching of teenager Jesse Washington in Waco, Tex., here.
Although African Americans were most frequently targeted, they were not the only victims of lynching. Some white victims were lynched for helping black people; immigrants from countries like Mexico, China and Australia were also lynched.
The current impeachment inquiry is not the first to be compared to lynching, as Princeton historian Kevin M. Kruse pointed out Tuesday in a tweet.
Fifth, this isn't the first time people have referred to an impeachment proceeding against a president as a "lynching" -- it came up often when conservatives tried to defend Richard Nixon in the Watergate investigation.
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