Lynchings Are So Much More Horrifying Than Schools Suggest

It’s not just a noose and, shockingly, we don’t talk about this.

Do you remember sitting down in history class, and hearing the teacher speak about Black history? I do. As a white girl in an all-white neighborhood, Black History Month felt a little foreign.

No, like, really, I wrote about some of this, but I feel it’s pertinent to this month too.

I mean, the only black girl at my elementary school was pulled out — allegedly because she was bullied. If you’ve read my writing before, you know that I grew up with a lot of racism that was just normalized around me.

In school, the way we were introduced to the concept of racism and racial attacks awkwardly

Our teacher’s voice just kind of hushed a bit, and explained that this chapter was “going to be very difficult” for us. It wasn’t difficult. It was just…awkward and really glossed over.

We were told the following about life for Black people after the Civil War, in a nutshell:

• Jim Crow laws kept Black Americans from getting good jobs, voting, or other things like that.
• Segregation happened and it was bad.
• Lynchings occasionally happened, and it meant someone got hanged in a tree.
• The KKK existed but then the Civil Rights movement happened, something something Martin Luther King, and they went away.
• Malcolm X existed, he was a civil rights leader, but we never really figured out what he did.
• Hip hop had words that rhyme but that’s about it. We were discouraged from listening to it as a whole.

I kid you not. That was about all the Black history we got aside from Harriet Tubman and a quick blurb about the Harlem Renaissance in middle school.

The concept of lynching was almost never spoken of, and that really stood out to me recently

Up until I was in high school, I didn’t really know what lynching really meant. I thought it meant that someone got beat up or hanged after doing something that was really bad. It was a punishment for people who deserved it, that’s all, right?

Well, no, that wasn’t right.

Lynching did involve nooses, but that was not even the most gruesome part. It wasn’t just name-calling or beatings. It was a truly sociopathic, psychotic act that genuinely showed a side of America that whites don’t want to think about.

A typical lynching from the turn of last century would be enough to make a lot of serial killers sick to their stomachs. It’s little wonder, then, that a lot of school curricula don’t give the full details of what that word truly means.

For those who grew up sheltered like me, let’s talk about what lynching *really* means

If you thought it just meant that there was a hanging going on, you probably had a similar educational experience to what I did. As a white person, I get it. These are “things that are not discussed,” if you know what I mean.

Here’s the real, fucked up, terrifying truth about lynching…

First off, it was a public spectacle that people would plan and show up for

This was not just a random angry mob bringing up pitchforks. This shit was actually planned — as in, a person who was accused of the crime would have people planning out his lynching.

Lynching was primarily a public spectacle, and what’s more insane is that the people committing the lynching would bring their family members to watch. That’s right, mothers with their children would occasionally come to watch someone get murdered for their own amusement.

Before the person was killed, they would often be publicly tortured

Whippings, burnings, and just full-on beatdowns were very common. This should not be a shock to anyone, considering the gruesome photos of the murder of Emmett Till.

Till, 14 at the time of his lynching, was beaten so badly, he was not actually recognizable. His ear also had been partially shot off.

Kids were often encouraged to partake in it

I don’t think that white people realize how indoctrinated some parts of the country used to be. The Oxford Academic has a paper about how children were encouraged to cheer on lynchers — or even partake in the murder.

What happened to those kids as they reached adulthood was fairly divided.

Many of those children were so disgusted by what they saw, they actually became a key component of the anti-lynching movement. Others dug their heels into white supremacy, just like their parents.

Murders were often photographed and sent as postcards

Imagine finding out that a friend of yours was murdered. (Speaking as someone who is reeling from two different friends getting killed, it hits very differently.)

You’re already grieving. You’re miserable because you just want to have a friend still be alive, and some piece of shit just killed them. Your friend was a good person. It feels unfair.

Now, imagine if the people who murdered your buddy also sent out POSTCARDS of the occasion. The postcards feature your friend’s corpse, hung from a tree, next to them smiling like hunters posing with a dead deer.

This was a real thing, and traditionally, these postcards would also describe the lynching — you know, for the other sick fucks who couldn’t be there.

Then, bodies would also get dismembered and given away as souvenirs

Yes, this was a real thing and there were times when the funeral might not even have a body. The crowd would even rush to take the body parts as souvenirs before law enforcement could even come.

So yeah, if you find a human ear or a toe in your grandparent’s home, that’s probably what you’re seeing.

Police would cover it up and aid the killers

To absolutely no one’s surprise, police often had a hand in covering up who did what. Officially, around 4,400 people have lost their lives to lynching. However, the NAACP (rightfully) believes that number to be extremely underreported.

Lynching was so normalized, that kids used to “play lynch” at school in the 1910s

Can you imagine how absolutely gruesome and violent America was back in the 1900s? I don’t think white America can anymore. It wasn’t just about shootouts and cowboys and robbers; it was an era of normalized murders.

One of the most notoriously gruesome lynchings in the 1900s happened in Salisbury, Maryland. It was so deeply ingrained in the public’s psyche, that children used to pretend to lynch one another.

They called the game “Salisbury.”

And today, our schools are trying to avoid the topic…just as they did in my day

Teachers are now being encouraged to stay silent about racism. School districts are throwing out Critical Race Theory and Black history books because they are “too upsetting.”

#Sorrynotsorry, we’re not doing any good by hiding the absolute, sheer systemic terror America unleashed on its minorities. We’re also not doing any good by trying to sugarcoat what racial violence looks like.

I grew up in an area where I’d hear people say, “They’ll lynch you” for that. That was just a turn of phrase casually thrown around for a sign that a person would yell at you or beat you up.

Had I known back then what lynching really meant or what it looked like, I’d have been horrified that it was just treated so casually. White America, we need to educate ourselves about the meaning of these words — and the echoes they still have after all these years.