*This film contains disturbing images* Between 1877 and 1950, more than 4,000 African Americans were lynched. Their deaths still impact voting patterns today. Learn more here: https://econ.st/31cCxQq Click here to subscribe to The Economist on YouTube: https://econ.st/2xvTKdy Many people know about the terror of lynchings. But one of the reasons black people were lynched was to suppress the black vote, which is still happening today. I am black. I come from the South, so this means a lot to me because my ancestors were lynched. My research looks at how historical lynchings correlate with black voter registration rates today. And what I find is that Black people who currently reside in counties that have been exposed to higher numbers of lynchings are less likely to register to vote and they are less likely to indicate that they voted in a recent election compared to their white counterparts. Voting is a social norm. Why do you vote? Because people around you vote. But what if their parents didn’t vote? And their parents didn’t vote? All of this is rooted in historical racial animus. What if you can go outside and see a body hanging from a tree? The lynching of Emmett Till is very iconic in American history. He was a 14-year-old boy from Chicago who allegedly whistled at a white woman and was kidnapped, tortured, beaten, killed, and his body was dumped in a river. When one of his killers was questioned, the first reason he gave for killing Emmett Till was the vote. As long as he lived and as long as he could do something about it, “the niggers were not going to vote in his area.” Because if they did, they would control the government. Lynching sends the signal that you vote, you die. You have no protection, you have no rights. We will kill you. That is the power of lynching. The rise of lynching came after slavery. African-Americans were no longer property and had to be put back in their place as slaves. “The oldest problem in the South, born 300 years ago with the introduction of slavery, is the Negro. Today in Dixie there are nearly nine million Negroes.” Blacks were actually seen as a political threat. In many counties in the South, blacks were in the majority. So when black people got the right to vote, if they voted a certain way, they could actually change the political structure of the South. This outraged a lot of white Southerners, particularly the KKK. And the way they responded to that was with lynchings. From 1890 to 1920, we had on average a lynching every other day. Lynchings were a spectacle. They were a public spectacle. There was this festival of violence. There was community involvement. People were tortured in front of crowds and dismembered. They even sold people’s body parts as souvenirs for individuals to buy. And they would bring their children to these lynchings. There were judges, police officers, politicians who were sometimes there or even participated. The impact of lynching on black communities was profound. Local officials were not really trusted because they were actually engaged in the domestic terrorism that was taking over your community. This distrust of local officials was culturally transmitted among black people. Lynching was a method of voter suppression. Although we don’t have bodies hanging from trees anymore, the past is never the past. I believe that giving black people the right to vote is actually a way of saying that their ancestors died for a reason. So that we could have the right to vote. And we are actually voting today. For more information about Economist films, visit: http://films.economist.com/ Check out The Economist’s full video catalogue: http://econ.st/20IehQk Like The Economist on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheEconomist/ Follow The Economist on Twitter: https://twitter.com/theeconomist Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theeconomist/ Follow us on Medium: https://medium.com/@the_economist
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How Lynching Still Affects American Politics

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