Maddie's Post 2/12

In Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s, “On Lynching’s”, I was shocked to find the grueling details and shocking statistics behind lynching’s. On page 34 Wells states, “More than ten thousand Negros have been killed in cold blood, without the formality of judicial trial and legal execution.” Thousands of innocent lives were taken, and no one cared because they were black lives. This ties in with Coates’ idea of the cheapness of black lives when on page 132 of “Between the World and Me” he states, “Black life is cheap, but in America black bodies are a natural resource of incomparable value.” I discovered more about what this quote meant in Wells and Leon Litwack’s pieces. Wells states on page 33 that, “While slaves were scourged mercilessly, and in countless cases inhumanly treated in other respects, still white owner rarely permitted his anger to go so far as to take a life, which would entail upon him a loss of several hundred dollars.” Slaves in this time were just a dollar sign to their owners. In “Trouble in Mind” Litwack says, “Back in those days, to kill a Negro wasn’t nothing. It was like killing a chicken or killing a snake.” (pg. 284). This statement shows that to whites, blacks were nothing more than livestock. In Leon Litwack’s “Trouble in Mind”, he states that one of the officer’s in a jail said “I went into that cell block with every intention of fulfilling my oath and protecting that man, but when the mob opened the door, the first half a dozen men standing there were leading citizens-businessmen, leaders of their churches and the community- I just couldn’t do it.” The people who were supposed to be protecting these African Americans could not even fulfill their duty to keep them safe. At this time in history, the government did not run the justice system. The citizens ran the justice system. Reading these stories, I felt so disappointed in the way our government, politicians, and law enforcement reacted to these daily lynching. Everyone just stood around to watch and encourage these horrific actions and no one took action to stop them.

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