Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America

by Michael Harriot

Their techniques varied so widely that the NAACP* eventually came up with four distinct qualities that defined lynching. SOMEONE HAD TO DIE FOR AN INCIDENT TO QUALIFY AS A LYNCHING. I know this seems obvious, but when around twenty-five masked men dragged Jo Reed out of a Nashville jail cell, put a rope around his neck, threw him over a suspension bridge, and shot at his body until the rope broke, he technically wasn’t a lynching victim because he survived. THREE OR MORE PEOPLE HAD TO TAKE PART IN THE KILLING.* The makeshift rules didn’t stipulate large crowds, like the one that appeared at sixteen-year-old Fred Rochelle’s lynching. When a deputy handed the teenager to vigilantes in Bartow, Florida, in 1901, the mob kindly arranged for a special train to transport onlookers to the “barbecue” before forcing Rochelle onto a barrel, chaining him to a stake, dousing him with kerosene, and burning him alive.11 ALL LYNCHINGS ARE ILLEGAL. For instance, after a crowd of more than a hundred pursued Fred Sullivan and his wife, Jane, after their arrest, the couple confessed to burning down a barn in Byhalia, Mississippi. But it hadn’t been legal for deputies to turn the pair over to “a committee of citizens.” Especially since the deputy came back to discover “twenty men had organized a Judge Lynch court and carried out the execution with little formality.”12 WHETHER THE MURDER WAS FOR JUSTICE OR TRADITION, THERE HAD TO BE A REASON FOR THE LYNCHING. David Walker was killed because he ...