From 1865 to 1965 more than 6,000 African-Americans died in racial violence
in the United States.
This inventory includes the names of 2,400 of the African-Americans who
were lynched in the United States from 1865 to 1965.
The inventory is necessarily incomplete. Records are scant. Newspaper
reports are scattered. The Tuskegee Institute Lynching Inventory began
in 1882 -- just before the great surge of lynchings that occurred around
the turn of the century -- a surge that accompanied the American conquest
of the Philippines, defeating the colored fighters of the Philippine
War of Independence, called by Anglo-American historians “The
Philippine Insurrection.”
This inventory is offered in the spirit of healing and reconciliation,
for until the wounds of the Lynching Century are healed there is little
chance of reducing the ever so pervasive racism in the United States,
as Ida B. Wells put it: The Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.
Americans have a long way to go to see full realization of the promises
of the Pledge of Allegiance, to see America as a land with Liberty and
Justice for All instead of liberty and justice for the white Anglo-Saxon
economic elite.
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