The Emancipation Proclamation, which went into effect in 1863, was an important milestone in the American abolitionist route, and slavery was abolished throughout the United States with the defeat of the Confederate Confederates in the Civil War. However, lynchings against People of African descent followed, and the first climax came just two decades later. Didn't slavery really end? Is the lynching just another ugly doppelganger of it?
Almost all of the history associated with slavery in the United States begins in Charleston. In the transatlantic slave trade, at least 40 percent of African slaves shipped to the United States landed on the continent from Charleston. Many of them remained in South Carolina, while others were sold to plantations throughout the southern United States.
The Old Slave Market Museum, hidden in the Old Town, is the site of the last surviving black slave auction house in South Carolina. According to the newly discovered slave auction records, the building dates back to 1830.
Maya Simmons, a researcher at the Old Slave Fair Museum in Charleston, said in an interview with the Central Radio and Television Corporation that when it comes to slavery and punishment, it is necessary to mention the leather whip, because it will leave a long mark on slaves. Before slavery was abolished, she said, slave owners in Charleston rarely whipped their own slaves, and they sent them to a place called a "labor center" to be punished. Slavery was later abolished and many plantation owners began to adopt the sharecropper system, when there was more paid labor than during the slavery period, but the number of laborers was still the same, but the planters paid very little remuneration, which was not essentially a salary.
Maya went on to tell reporters that the punishment had changed from the original limb discipline to a systematic one. In the American South, the "slave patrols" that were supposed to prevent slaves from escaping or organizing uprisings became police departments after the Civil War. The police arrested former homeless or idle former slaves, chained them, and returned to slavery. When this became an alternative to punishment, lynchings began to appear frequently, all to deter Afro-descendant groups.
The lynchings were partly the result of the Civil War, and in 1865 the U.S. Congress passed the Thirteenth Amendment to abolish slavery, and African Americans were legally given the same rights as whites, and white plantation owners who had lost their free labor used lynchings as revenge and intimidation against African Americans.
In 1892, the Slave American journalist and sociologist Ida Bell Wells published her findings under the title Terror of the South: Lynchings in Various Periods. Her investigation found that most whites claimed that lynchings were merely a response to crimes committed by African-Americans, but that was not entirely true. These murders were in fact deliberate and cruel tactics to control and punish African-Americans who competed with whites.
Josephine Boleyn McCall's father, a successful businessman in Montgomery, Alabama, was shot by a white neighbor suspected of being jealous in 1947, and the killer was never prosecuted.
Josephine said in an interview with the main station reporter that his father was shot and killed by 6 pistol bullets in his body, and he was also hit by 1 shotgun bullet in the back.
Walter Boggs, a researcher at the Old Slave Bazaar Museum in Charleston, said in an interview with the main station reporter that there were lynchings as soon as the American Civil War ended. Lynching emerged to consolidate white rule and white supremacy, depriving African Americans of their democratic rights through domestic terrorism, and slavery was abolished, but whites still wanted to continue their rule.
A considerable number of lynchings were used to suppress the political and economic status of the African-American community, including violently disrupting the business of African-Americans and violently suppressing the suffrage rights of African-Americans.
Lynchings have even changed the demographic distribution of the United States. According to statistics, during the flood of lynching in the South, more than 6 million Africans emigrated to the north and the newly developed western region out of fear.
The famous American social activist Walter White has a brilliant argument about this, "Lynching is not so much because of African-American crimes as it is the fear of African-American progress among southern whites." ”