Black people were relentlessly terrorized by white vigilantes—with impunity—after the Emancipation Proclamation, as soon as the Reconstruction Era culminated. From 1865 to 1877, more than two thousand African Americans were lynched.3 For eighty-seven consecutive years, from 1865 to 1952, at least one Black person was lynched every single year in the US.4 Lynchings, however, did not stop in 1952; this was just the first year there was any sort of reprieve. The number of Black people lynched between 1880 and 1968 averages out to a Black person being lynched weekly for eighty-eight consecutive
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