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Lynching In The 1920's

599 Words3 Pages

In 1920, Lynching was very common. In order to understand why this was such a big problem, we need to look at the numbers of people who were lynched. From 1882 to 1962, almost 5,000 lynchings took place in the United States alone with about 70% of people who were lynched being black. Lynching started becoming a heavily used punishment among the African-American community in the 19th century. After the Civil War ended, there were financial issues in the country, all of which were blamed on the blacks that had recently been freed from slavery. It was speculated that people who were angry with blacks saw lynching as a way to relieve tension between the two groups of people. Because of the blatant aversion many people had towards black people, they were subject to many hate crimes. With the levels of violence as high as they where, protection was necessary, and Anti-Lynching laws would have been …show more content…

They started lynching to protect white women from rapists, even though rape was not their biggest threat. The biggest threat at the time was homicide, with many other reasons following. The court systems were not very fair at the time. Klan members were among the judge and jury, making the trials extremely biased against blacks. This led to many false accusations towards black people. The south was especially notorious for lynching blacks. About eighty-three percent of people lynched were black. In 1922, "The Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill" was an effort to stop lynching altogether in the United States. The people behind this bill were obviously not okay with lynching, and saw it as an unlawful and immoral thing to do to another human being. This bill proposed that lynching should be classified as a federal felony with heavy punishments, such as paying fines up to $10,000 and/or up to five years in prison. However, the bill was never passed due to the strong dissent from the Southern

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