Wells links her performances of respectability and womanliness to her segregated experience to expose the irrational logic of
lynch law.
Over an appreciable period of time having been obsessed with the idea of knocking off the garrison at Fort Pillow and re-taking it, General Nathan Bedford Forrest conceived of the situation at Fort Pillow as a foremost opportunity to exemplify the effectiveness of employing the lynch law to keep the "niggers" in their "place" and preserving white supremacy.
After thoroughly pondering the question of the Negro in the post-Civil War South, General Nathan Bedford Forrest decided that the use of the lynch law was the best and most effective way to keep "niggers" in their "place".
While denouncing lynch law, though, the pamphlet by no means isolates lynching's practice; instead, it insists on the inextricability of such extralegal violence from what Wells calls "class legislation" (Chapter 2) and "the convict lease system" (Chapter 3), state-sanctioned forms of discrimination that exemplify the systemic quality of race-hatred in the United States.
The 1893 exposition haunted by the spectre of lynch law and politicized by the antilynching activism of Wells and Douglass also introduced many of its visitors to another kind of souvenir: the picture postcard, a mass-produced communications technology that would soon provide one signature for mobility in modernity.
It says that if the courts don't condone capital punishment,
lynch law will result.
Tyree's fatalism is grounded in actual experience, and leads him to take on the responsibility of conferring the codes of lynch law to his son.
Stephen Best has recently read this exchange in the context of Wright's Black Boy as the intersection of lynch law (or the law of abuse and threats of bodily harm) and family law (the law of "the Southern way of life," in which people occupy a hierarchically determined "place").
22) The fictional representations of
lynch law reinforce the notion of race solidarity because they present lynchings as a matter of white upon black, of one race versus the other; and while this was indeed primarily and all too often the case in the South at the time, what Hurston demonstrates with the description of white vigilantes ganging up on another white man is the original point of the chapter, that one race does not always stick together, that various members can be at odds with each other, and that a particular kind of situation - like a lynching - does not apply in precisely the same way to only the same victims all the time.
Wells tend to think of a woman of almost mythic proportions, an unflinching anti-lynching activist who challenged new railway segregation laws in the 1880s and won (though the case was soon overturned), who in 1892, the year she began her crusade and published Southern Hotrod:
Lynch Law in all its Phases, almost single-handedly turned back the flow of lynchings in the U.
The Great Migration to escape
lynch laws, chain gangs, mob rule, share-cropping and the thousand other everyday humiliations of legal segregation was largely organized in the church.
David Colvin of Action on Child Exploitation said: "We want tighter controls, but we're not keen to go down the American road because it does lead to
lynch laws.
