WASHINGTON – Some lawmakers and civil rights advocates are calling for the Justice Department to be more aggressive in prosecuting hate crimes now that lynching is a federal hate crime.
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James White looked at the barren ground in Elaine, Arkansas, where a memorial tree dedicated to hundreds of Black lynching victims once grew and reflected on his hometown.
The day after Gilbert Harris was lynched in downtown Hot Springs, the Hot Springs Sentinel-Record sought to defend his killing: “There was not racial prejudice in that lynching of yesterday morning. Any other thief who would have killed a well-known and popular man in the act of robbery, would have received the same treatment.”
George White prayed incessantly as the lynch mob leaders placed dry straw around him and a stake with twigs in Wilmington, Delaware.
The revival of the Ku Klux Klan began in November 1915 with a cross burning atop Stone Mountain, Georgia, led by Methodist preacher William Joseph Simmons, who functioned as the klan’s Imperial Wizard.
The Pittsburgh Courier that Robert L. Vann acquired in 1910 was a newspaper of humble beginnings. Its previous owner was a security guard at the H.J. Heinz Company food packing plant, and a self-published poet who sold copies for a nickel apiece.
Not quite 40 years after Freedom of the Press became protected by the First Amendment of the Constitution, a group of free Black men came together to discuss the news of the day and the newspapers that delivered it.
Simeon Booker, then a reporter for Jet magazine, was a witness to history on the day in 1955 when Mamie Till Mobley stared at the bloodied and bloated body of 14-year-old Emmett, her only child.
Black journalist Alexander M. Rivera, who covered Willie Earle lynching trial, recalls tension, fear
Alexander M. Rivera, a Black reporter and photographer for The Pittsburgh Courier, was on assignment to cover “the trial of the century” as he and others described it to readers, a trial that could mark a turning point in the legacy of lynching in the South.
Breathlessly, the man scrambled along the railroad tracks, barely catching the next northbound train out of town. He bought his ticket onboard and tried to swallow a sense of
foreboding.
