DURING the days of slavery and after, there were times when whites would capture blacks and kill them in a painful way called lynching.
The word lynch is similar to the word crucify and it means to kill an individual after making him feel excruciating pain.
Reasons why blacks were lynched included alleged sleeping with a white woman and leading a rebellion, among others.
The whites were ever ready to lynch black men most of it motivated by shear racism and hatred of the black people.
Sometimes a whole white community would rise against a black community resulting in several black people being lynched.
At a typical lynching, the whites would gather around the black victim like an audience at a show.
The black victim would first get beaten up, and then shot but not mortally. The victim was spat on, pierced with knives and then hung on a tree.
Once on the tree, the whites would gather wood under him to light a fire. The victim would then have his private parts cut off.
The ears, fingers, lips and nose were also cut and some of the participating whites would keep these body parts as souvenirs.
To this day, there are descendants of whites who keep body parts of black people who were lynched by their forefathers.
The lynching would end with a big fire which would devour the black victim to ashes.
The whites would yell and take pictures and the rest of the blacks would flee and take cover in their homes. It was not uncommon for innocent black by-standers also to be lynched for the fun of it.
The white crowds comprising men, women and children would make noise in excitement as if the lynching of a black man was a sport. The governors of the cities which would have conducted a lynching would publish stories in newspapers with phrases such as “Lynching well done last night fellow citizens.”
Lynching began during the time of slavery and extended into the 20th Century.
Initially, the white racists acted against their black victims covering their faces to make threats, burn houses and whip the black victims. Such attacks were carried out by white racist groups like the Ku Klux Klan (KKK).
When lynching was adopted as a form of punishment, the whites did not bother concealing their identity.
While lynching of black people in America is discussed as a historical phenomenon, the black people who live in America are as exposed to white violence as they were in history.
Many African Americans are shot and killed by the police and ordinary white people every day in the United States with the perpetrators getting away with it.
Police brutality on blacks is a kind of modern day lynching. The black community of America can do nothing about it but mourn their dead and complain because it is clear that the security forces of America are not there to protect the blacks, but the interests of the whites and their government.
The conditions of slavery were so tough on the blacks that some of them opted to escape from their slave masters to acquire freedom.
In the north there were no farms and barns.
As such there was less need for slaves. The northern states were focused on building cities and industrialisation.
Thus there were jobs for the oppressed groups such as women and blacks. The blacks would be employed as free men and would be rewarded for their labour.
Although there was clear segregation against blacks in the north, it was much better in the minds of the black slaves, to be a worker in the north than to be a slave in the south.
For this reason, many of the blacks who would escape would head north. In the north, many different nationalities were getting into the country.
In New York, there were Irish, Scottish, English, Italian, and French populations and thus the blacks would find a more culturally mixed society.
The blacks were at the very bottom of the social hierarchy but there was also segregation among the whites themselves in those days.
Once the blacks were familiar with some escape routes, they would often compose songs that recorded the direction and objects that a runaway could use. The songs were seemingly songs of lamentation which they would sing at work time in the fields.
The common slave knew nothing about what was beyond his or her master’s plantation and thus songs which would direct them when running away were very important.
They would name rivers, mountains and stars in the songs and these would guide the runaway slave.
There were some blacks who got so good at escaping that they returned and helped other slaves to escape.
An example is a black woman named Harriet Tubman. She was a slave who managed to escape her master’s plantation. Instead of heading and staying up north, she decided to return and help other slaves to run away.
Her rescue trips which were 13 in total, rescued 70 plus slaves in a period of 11 years. She is highly honoured by the black Americans of today and she is remembered for her love and courage.
When black women were caught trying to escape, they were usually raped by the slave catchers before being returned to their slave master’s residence.
There was also a punishment called the ‘hot box’ whereby the attempted runaway woman was stripped naked and confined in a wooden box that resembled a small coffin.
Crouching to fit, she would be left in the sun to burn for hours in the heat of summer. The idea of these ruthless forms of punishment was to discourage other blacks from thinking of running away.
Nat Turner was a nightmare to the whites and he led a small guerilla war against the whites which led to the killing of 60 white men, women and children.
He mobilised a notable but relatively small army of rebel slaves and they managed to put terror in the whites at a time when blacks were viewed as docile and submissive slaves.