Lynching Preachers: How Black Pastors Resisted Jim Crow and White Pastors Incited Racial Violence
Lynching Preachers: How Black Pastors Resisted Jim Crow and White Pastors Incited Racial Violence
Religion was no barrier for lynch mobs intent on terror. White pastors incited racial violence and took part in lynchings even though sometimes the victim was a preacher.
The Conversation
Malcolm Brian Foley
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A funeral held in July 1945 for two victims of the Ku Klux Klan, George Dorsey and his sister, Dorothy Dorsey Malcolm, of Walton County, Georgia, held at the Mt. Perry Baptist Church Sunday. Photo from Bettman via Getty.
White lynch mobs in America murdered at least 4,467 people between 1883 and 1941, hanging, burning, dismembering, garroting and blowtorching their victims.
Their violence was widespread but not indiscriminate: About 3,300 of the lynched were black, according to the most recent count by sociologists Charles Seguin and David Rigby. The remaining dead were white, Mexican, of Mexican descent, Native American, Chinese or Japanese.
Such numbers, based on verifiable newspaper reports, represent a minimum. The full human toll of racial lynching may remain ever beyond reach.
Religion was no barrier for these white murderers, as I’ve discovered in my research on Christianity and lynch mobs in the Reconstruction-era South. White preachers incited racial violence, joined the Ku Klux Klan and lynched black people.
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A white lynch mob in Shelbyville, Tennessee, in 1941. Photo from Bettmann via Getty.
The National Memorial For Peace And Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, commemorates the victims of lynching. Photo by Bob Miller / Getty Images.
Ida B. Wells, the great documentarian of the lynching era, in 1920. Photo from the Chicago History Museum / Getty Images.
Malcolm Brian Foley is a PhD Candidate in Religion - Historical Studies at Baylor University.
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