On June 15, 1920, a white mob broke into a jail in Duluth, Minnesota, and lynched three black men—Elias Clayton, Elmer Jackson, and Isaac McGhie—accused of raping a white woman. This website tells the story of that attack and its aftermath through more than 700 primary source documents and photographs relating to the lynchings, legal proceedings against members of the lynch mob and several other black men accused of rape, and the incarceration of three white mob members for rioting and one black man for rape. It ends with the aftermath of the incident, including a drop in the black population of Duluth by 16 percent, the formation of an active NAACP chapter in the city, and a campaign for anti-lynching legislation. A Background section sets the scene in 1920s Duluth alongside information on rising racial tensions across the country and lynchings in northern states. An interactive timeline of events surrounding the lynchings, accompanied by an audio narrative, is a good place to begin. All documents are keyword searchable and browseable by document type (government document, newspaper, correspondence) and by date.
The U.S. Department of Justice takes another look at the Emmett Till case in which a 14-year-old African-American boy was brutally murdered by two white men in Mississippi.
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Professor Eric Foner of Columbia University considers the lynchings of blacks in the South to be a "system of terror," carried out in public.
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This iCue Mini-Documentary describes the decades after Reconstruction. These years were a difficult time for African Americans, but new black leaders began to emerge in the 1800s who gave a voice to black suffering.
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University of Pennsylvania professor Steven Hahn examines the violent phenomenon of lynching, which saw an enormous rise in the Reconstruction period in the South.
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NBC Narrator Rosalind Jordan looks back at the story of Emmett Till, who was 14 when he left Chicago to visit his family in the segregated South. Two white men accused Till of making a pass at Bryant's wife, Carolyn, and Till was brutally murdered.
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This iCue Mini-Documentary describes the two groups which African Americans were divided into at the beginning of the 20th century: those willing to work within the system for advancement and those willing to fight the system for better treatment.
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This iCue Mini-Documentary describes how the production demands of World War I draw blacks and whites from rural areas to factory jobs in the cities. However, along with that migration came racial tension.
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James Allen has assembled a collection of chilling photographs of lynchings throughout America, primarily from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Many were circulated as souvenir postcards. The site is a companion to Allen's book Without Sanctuary. The exhibit can be experienced through a flash movie with narrative comments by Allen or as a gallery of more than 80 photographs with brief captions. Most images also have links to more extensive descriptions of the circumstances behind each specific act of violence.
While the vast majority of lynching victims were African Americans, white victims are also depicted. Individually and as a group, these images are disturbing and difficult to fathom. They provide, however, an excellent resource for approaching the virulence and impact of racism in late 19th and 20th-century America.