Please post your responses to Ida B. Wells and Leon Litwack here:
Freedom Riders 3/26
As I watched the “Freedom Riders” documentary, the more disgusted I become at that racial injustices in American history. At the beginning of the documentary, there is a small montage of bigots giving poor excuses as to why the South should remain segregated. However, there was one quote that stuck out that stated, “You can not change a way of life overnight. The more they try to force us into doing something, the worse the reaction is going to be.” Racism should not be a way of life anyone wants to live through or put onto someone else. The Freedom Riders and many nonviolent protesters weren’t physically imposing on others, so why was the reaction of segregationists to worsening as “they try to force” them into a realistic way of life? Watching the documentary and listening to how the Riders were willing to be martyrs for the Movement as they were physically attacked, their property was destroyed via molotov and mentally drained daily makes me appreciate activism a great deal more, ...
After reading Ida B. Wells' book, "On Lynching's", It made me think about how horrifying and disturbing living in that day in age would be, let alone witnessing the lynchings in person. Wells mentions that lynching was not a response to crimes committed by African Americans, but rather a tool of oppression used to uphold white economic power. The way I interpret that is strictly that people continued to lynch people for entertainment. She cited multiple incidents that black men and women were being falsely accused of crimes such as rape, murder, etc.. In Leon F. Litwack's piece, "Trouble in Mind", he states that "In visiting their retribution on Sam Hose, whites in this region around Palmetto were acting out of frustration and anger over a series of incendiary and costly fires the previous month. Holding "outlawed negros" responsible for these acts, authorities had arrested nine men on arson charges." These men were then tied together with ropes and shot while a mob of people watches. This indicates that people enjoyed watching African Americans tortured to death. Ida B. Wells campaign was a savior to many African Americans in danger in 1892. In my opinion, she is responsible for those people that continued to live to see the next day. Wells began with writing a series of editorials, and finishes them by giving advice to people in the southern area. She called for southern black citizens to turn their backs on the places they are oppressed and to move to other cities, states or territories. She also recommended that blacks keep a rifle in their homes to protect themselves mainly because the law does not protect them. These are just a few examples of what Wells wrote about during her campaign, I support her claims about everything she wrote about in "On lynchings", because i could not imagine watching three of my friends getting publicly murdered for a crime they did not commit. Although i cannot related to everything involved in this book, imagining living during the time of these events would truly be traumatizing.
ReplyDeleteWithin chapter six of Leon F. Litwack’s novel, Trouble in Mind, Litwack describes the lynchings that took place during the late 1890’s. In my personal experience, topics such as lynchings were not talked about in my past education. The horrifying descriptions of what took place during lynchings is inhumane. One quote states, “while some in the crowd plunged knives into the victims flesh, other watch ‘with unfeigned satisfaction’ the contortions of Sam Hose’s body as the flames rose, distorting his features, causing his eyes to bulge out of his sockets and rupturing his veins” (pg. 281). The picture this quotes draws shows the hatred towards African-Americans and the brutal truth of the South. The crowd physically showed their hatred by throwing knives at the innocent man. While some members of the crowd expressed their hatred through obvious ways, other members silently watched with ‘unfeigned satisfaction’. The word ‘unfeigned’ typically relates to feelings of sincere or wholeheartedness. Watching someone get beaten and torn apart to death is just pure evil. Another part of lynching that I was unaware of was that “small pieces of bones went for 25 cents, a piece of liver ‘crisply cooked’ sold for 10 cents” (pg. 281). This is what Coates meant in Between the World and Me about losing his body. Back in the late 1890’s, African-Americans physically lost their bodies. People bought parts of black people’s bodies because of their value, yet they were given no rights as a person. As Ida B. Wells stated in On Lynchings, “the Southern white man owned the Negro body and soul” (pg. 33). In the South, public lynchings occured daily, demolishing thousands of innocent men, women, and children. In today’s society, Coates still mentions that black people still have to fight for their body. Much has changed since the late 1890’s, but African-Americans still live with the fear and the trauma of what happened to their ancestors.
ReplyDeleteReading Ida B. Wells-Barnett's "On Lynchings" gives the reader a look into the injustices the African Americans went though because of the prejudice white people of the United States. White men in the United States would purposely accuse African Americans of crimes they didn't commit merely to get them punished and/or killed. They would do this to make sure the African Americans kept submission to the whites. For example, one story says that a white man and a colored man assaulted a white girl. The white man was imprisoned and promised to fight the case on trial while the black man was lynched immediately. Wells writes, "The 'burly Negro' was promptly lynched without investigation or examination of inconsistent stories"(pg 27). This is one of the many examples of white privilege throughout Wells' book. Wells voices a solution that would stop the injustices against the African Americans in one of the beginning pages of her book. Wells expresses, "When the white man who is always the aggressor knows he runs as great risk of biting the dust every time his Afro-American victim does, he will have greater respect fo Afro-Amerrican life"(pg 26). I think this is a great quote because one of the main reasons these injustices kept happening and keep happening is because white people feel like they can do anything to African Americans without any dire consequences put upon them. In Leon Litwack's "Trouble in Mind", he also writes about several horrible examples of African Americans getting severely tortured and killed at the hands of the white population in the United States. One story that really disturbed me is when he described how the white men memorialized a lynching. He writes, "[...] John H. Holmes, opened his mail one day to find a postcard depicting a crowd in Alabama posing for a photographer next to the body of a black man dangling by a rope [...]"(pg 283-284). He then later on tells us that the card had writing on it saying, "This is how we do them down here." This really showed me how malicious and just straight up evil these people of this time period are. These people didn't believe that, if you went bone deep past biological features, African Americans were the same as white people. And this, along with white people wanting to keep power, was the root of the problem.
ReplyDeleteWhile reading “On Lynching”, I saw a lot that connected with things we read in Coates “Between the World and Me” . Some of the similarities I saw included the image of black bodies, “The Dream”, but most importantly the criminalization of black men. There was a common thread in the entire reading that surrounded the “rape” of white women. We, in society, always hear of these stories such as the in movie “Birth of a Nation”. Even with the evidence posed in some of these cases, lynch mobs still came after African American men, innocent or not. On page 17, there is a quote relating to what we discussed as the Dream and how African American people are put up against each other to reach for a dream they can never fully achieve. The quote reads, “ Even to the better class of Afro-Americans the crime of rape is so revolting they have too often taken the white man’s word and given lynch law neither the investigation nor condemnation it deserved”. I found this quote to be so significant because I believe we still see this in many ways today. The primary way to find out information during this era was the newspaper. Everyone read it, which is how I assume the African American people did too. However, even if there was the smallest inkling of evidence the suspect would be taken off and tortured. Though not as extreme as this, the media (news outlets in particular) show mainly negative images of black people as criminals. There have been many times where even my grandmother has questioned the people of our own race. I think a lot of this “ill feeling” is that there isn’t/ wasn’t an even ratio to images of black people. Both some of the people now and of the late 1800 made them question images of things they already knew to be untrue.
ReplyDeleteAfter reading both “Hellhounds” by Leon Litwack and “Southern Horrors” by Ida B. Wells I am disturbed by the things that I read. However, I think that it is important to learn about this aspect of American history because, at least in my high school, this was a topic that was often glossed over in history class. My teachers used to always deem lynchings and the graphic violence endured by African-Americans as too gory to show in class. I think that without the details of the mutilation and annihilation of black lives it is impossible to understand the treatment of African-American bodies, as Coates might say. This reminds me of a quote from Coates “ To awaken them is to reveal that they are an empire of humans and, like all empires of humans, are built on the destruction of the body.” Often I think that if we do not acknowledge our wrong doings people believe they will just go away along with racism. Also, I thought that the idea of justification that was presented in both pieces was something that I found interesting. In “Southern Horrors” the white men who are committing the lynchings try to justify their actions by painting the black man as a criminal. In the case of the grocery store incident the white men were the aggressors, and the black men were just defending themselves against a mob. However, when three white men were injured the media painted the African-American people in such a poor light that it fueled white southern’s hatred even more. And with the reputation of the black men involved smeared, it gave the white men who lynched their bodies more justification for what they had done. Similarly in “Hellhounds” Litwack a black man by the name of Sam Hose, killed his white boss in self defense after he attacked him. The media concocted varying stories about what had occurred, but one story stated that Hose murdered his boss in cold blood, and then raped his wife. Hose was eventually found, stripped naked, mutilated, hung, and burned. Again, the media gave Hose’s murder’s the justification they needed to feel as though they were keeping their wives and families safe from the evil black man. Besides justification, another aspect of both readings that I thought was important was the idea of African-American men raping white women. The story that Wells tells about Mrs.Underwood draws a striking similarity to the plot of “To Kill a Mockingbird.” A white man is falsely convicted of raping a white women. In Mrs. Undrewood’s case she was having consensual sex with a black man which was considered morally and legally wrong in the South during her time. Instead of admitting that she was willing having an affair with a black man she lied. In the book “To Kill a Mockingbird” Tom Robinson is falsely convicted of rape, when a local white women accuses him for not accepting her sexual advances. It interesting to me that the women’s “taboo” desires stripped a man of his freedom, and what's worse is that it was so easily justified. These pieces had me think that maybe the black man is the American's patsy.
ReplyDeleteCoates, Ta-Nehisi. Between the World and Me. Ditzingen: Reclam, 2017
Wells-Barnett, Ida B. On Lynchings. Mineola, NY, Inc.: Dover Publications, 2014
Litwack, Leon F. Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow. New York: Vintage Books, 2006.
Bloom, Harold. To Kill a Mockingbird. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 1999.
ReplyDeleteI must admit, that after completing the assigned reading section of “on Lynchings” by Ida B. Wells and “Trouble In Mind” by Leon F. Litwack, that I was feeling many different emotions at once, the first primarily being anger and agony. The way these African American people were subjected to be worth nothing, like their lives had zero value to the white man reminded me of the argument Ta-Nehisi Coates was making regarding the body of a black person constantly being at risk. There was not a single ounce of accountability but rather, barbaric and ruthless killings that almost always went unpunished. It seems that during this time it didn’t matter if you were a really young African American or an old one, to these murderers a negro was a negro and they felt that that body did something wrong then it would be hung up and lynched by days end. Which to me, not only breaks my heart but infuriates me. Who sat down and granted the white man power to be the executioner? Some may argue that often times these lynching would be following the accusation of something and to that I say what right did they have to play the part of God, let alone the justice system that this country had in place? At any given accusation it was as if a mob was waiting, lurking in the shadows awaiting their queue to come in and within moments ravish and tear apart the body of the negro. And with absolutely no regard to the lives they were taking, people would gather around ready to watch as if it was staged theatre or live concert. I could not imagine living at a time like this, especially being that I am an African American man with many intersectional identities.
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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