Lynching in America

(Alfred Rudolph Waud, Harper’s Weekly.)
The Fourteenth Amendment, which was ratified in 1868, established that all persons
born in the United States, regardless of race, are full citizens of the United States and the
of the states in which they reside, and are entitled to the “privileges and immunities” of
citizenship, including due process. Though a hopeful development, the Supreme Court
quickly dismantled the amendment’s promise in The Slaughterhouse Cases and U.S. v.
Cruikshank. 20 As a result, African Americans accused of violating the racial order were met
with violence and terror; they received little protection from local officials, and they had
no claim to federal assistance.
Black veterans were seen as a particularly strong threat to racial hierarchy and were
an early target of discriminatory state laws. To eliminate black gun ownership, which had
reached unprecedented levels during the war due to black military service, states including
Alabama, Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana, and Mississippi passed laws that made it a crime
for an African American to possess a firearm. 21
Florida’s Black Code of 1866 prohibited black people from possessing “any
Bowie-knife, dirk, sword, firearms or ammunition of any kind” and made violations punishable
by public whipping. 22 Mississippi’s statute declared “that no freedman, free negro
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