CHRISTIANS AND LYNCHING

"They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain." — Isaiah 11:9

Lynching is one of the defining horrors of American history, yet for much of the twentieth century it

was treated as a regional aberration — a Southern problem, a problem of ignorant mobs, a problem

that had nothing to do with respectable institutions or mainstreamg society. That comfortable distance

was always a lie.Between 1877 and 1950, more than four thousand African Americans were lynched in the

American South alone. That figure, painstakingly documented by the Equal Justice Initiative and

confirmed by decades of historical scholarship, represents only the documented cases. The true

number will never be known. Lynchings were often unrecorded, celebrated locally, or deliberately

obscured by communities that understood what they had done.

But understanding lynching requires more than numbers. It requires grasping what lynching

was — not simply murder, but public spectacle. Victims were tortured, burned, hanged, and shot

before crowds that sometimes numbered in the thousands. Bodies were mutilated. Body parts were

sold as souvenirs. Photographs were taken and turned into postcards. Children were present.