Leid Stories 02.12.15

Lynching: America’s White Reign of Terror Against Blacks

Jesse Jackson Strikes on Little League Baseball

Between the Civil War and World War II, thousands of African American men, women and children were victims of “terror lynchings,” says our guest, Bryan Stevenson, founder and director of the Montgomery, Ala.-based Equal Justice Initiative, which has documented almost 4,000 such cases in 12 Southern states.

These barbaric and public acts of torture and terrorism, Stevenson says, were tools of white supremacy that “created a fearful environment where racial subordination and segregation were maintained with limited resistance for decades.”

Stevenson discusses the findings of the EJI’s report, “Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror,” released Tuesday.