Blog for 2/12/19

After reading "On Lynchings" by Ida B. Wells and "Trouble In Mind" by Leon F. Litwack, I was enraged as well as equally saddened by the way the idea of superiority, and money effected people’s mortality. The disregard for black lives was unfathomable. The stories told in these two pieces are some extreme  examples of how Ta-nehisi Coates discussed how black people have never been in control of our bodies. At any given moment a white person could’ve  ended your life with just a few simple words. Whether or not the accused people were innocent, the white mobs used it as their chance to treat black people as a hunting game. The way they collected and sold body parts as prizes and souvenirs resembles how a hunter hangs a deer head up that he killed. Black people were dehumanized so much so that executions of them were deemed family events and put on postcards. Since they could not make money from black labor, they used black deaths to replace it. The executions were held a lot like shows, where you could buy a picture with the body to go with your piece of body part. 
The problem didn’t only rest with the mobs of white murderers, the media of the time played a big part as well. Newspapers purposely wrote of the accused crimes from the words of white people, who most of the time weren’t eye witnesses. They purposely did not write about how the accused was found not guilty and how he or she was viciously murdered for no reason. It is also very peculiar how a public display of a lynching can be done by “unknown persons”, these same displays that were viewed by hundreds of people.The language used in the news articles purposely painted vivid pictures of black people being monsters who needed to be taught a lesson on who was  in charge. A lot of the white people who justified these unlawful lynchings and burnings talked of how valueless black lives were. If that were true was the civil war really necessary? Why fight so hard to keep if these black lives held no value to you? In reality southerners were upset on the circumstances that they were left with post civil war, and I believe took out their anger on these mostly innocent black bodies. Then found alternative reasons to cover their true feelings. 

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