LYNCHED FOR ANYTHING OR NOTHING

After emancipation, as ex-slave men/colored men were entitled to vote and some other legal rights, defending dominant-race power involved the construction of a racist discourse -- black and white masculinities and feminities through “the language of body”.  By identifying black male sexuality as dangerous to white womanhood, it began a dreadful period of lynching and radicalism against black men.  According to what we learn from previous chapters in Through Women’s Eyes, we acknowledge that interracial marriage was forbidden by social authorities during those eras.   Any sexual contacts between black men and white women were strictly monitored and disciplined; however those white men who involved with black women were overlooked. From my own perspective and through reading the Red Record, lynching was a way for white society to show their disapproval and their way to “talk back” to a “mess” of social order.  Wells-Barnett through the Red Record also mentioned that lynching’s main victims was African American men, colored men who were worthy of kindness and protection. When we think of lynching, we usually think of evil, dangerous person who harms other people physically, however according to the Red Record, these poor colored men was lynched for everything “anything or nothing”. They were lynched for stealing hogs, for wife beating, for a quarrel, even for no offense. Just because those poor belonged to minority society, just because of their races, they couldn’t prove for their innocent, and their precious life was totally ignored.