The Red Record: Revisited: African American Lynching Then & Now

Many people have never heard the terms Lynch Law or lynching. Lynching carries a few different connotations. On the one hand it suggest the brutal practice of hanging black people or African Americans by mobs of white people. The African American is denied any of the protections secured for all Americans in the Constitution. The fourteenth amendment to the United States Constitution consist of a Citizenship clause, Privileges or Immunities Clause, a Due Process Clause, and an Equal Protection Clause. The basis of these clauses are structured in a manner to protect an individual’s Constitutional rights to what they stipulate, the first section of which states as follows: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." In the pages that follow Ida Wells will provide you with detailed accounts of the clear constitutional violations that African Americans suffer then and come away with more of an understanding of the mind-set that brings these types of horrors into the 21st Century. "Not all nor nearly all of the murders done by white men, during the past thirty years in the South, have come to light, but the statistics as gathered and preserved by white men, and which have not been questioned, show that during these years more than ten thousand African Americans have been killed in cold blood, without the formality of judicial trial and legal process." (Ida B. Wells). If we don’t understand our history, we are doomed to repeat it and this is what we are experiencing today in the United States. Police Brutality is rampant and effects all of us, black, white, red, and brown and because of that we should all be familiar with this history. It is with that hope that we have taken it upon ourselves to make the spirit of Ida B. Wells and the great Frederick Douglass available to a new generation. "We claim to be a highly-civilized and Christian country.

I will not stop to deny this claim, still I fearlessly affirm that there is nothing in the history of savages to surpass the blood-chilling horrors and fiendish excesses perpetrated against the African American people of this country, by the so-called enlightened and Christian people of the south. It is commonly thought that only the lowest and most disgusting birds and beasts, such as buzzards, vultures and hyenas, will gloat over and prey upon dead bodies; but the Southern mob, in its rage, feeds its vengeance by shooting, stabbing and burning their victims, when they are already dead."

When the moral sense of a nation begins to decline, and the wheels of progress to roll backward, there is no telling how low the one will fall or where the other will stop. The downward tendency, already manifest, has swept away some of the most important safeguards of justice and liberty. After you have read the contents of the materials here presented you will have no doubt what this constitutional amendment means in every day usage and how it should protect all American citizens. And, I believe, you will see how the brutal murder, castrations, and hangings of African American men, women, and children parallels with the open and blatant murder of African Americans by police officers in our streets today all over the nation. Why are African Americans concerned? As of August 2015, more than 385 people have been shot and killed by police officers in our streets. And, according to Jim Bueermann, a former police chief and president of the Washington-based Police Foundation, “These shooting are grossly underreported.” Of these numbers 16% were unarmed or carrying a toy.