by Chris Martin

Created on: November 08, 2008   Last Updated: November 24, 2008

The Worse Evil: The Jim Crow South

Historically the African American population in America has been faced with a multitude of oppressive forces. The gradual attainment of personal rights and acceptance that African Americans have gained over time can be viewed as a progression through certain "stages" of freedom. In their quest for equality, African Americans faced hardships much worse during the period of time known from 1876-1954 as the Jim Crow South era as compared to their time of enslavement due to physical torture, educational, and political problems.

The life of an African American slave could be extremely brutal, as accounts from numerous once-enslaved persons have reported. Frederick Douglass had a first hand account of the torture slaves faced. As an enslaved child, "[Douglass had] often been awakened at the dawn of day by the most heart-rending shrieks of an own aunt of [his], whom [the slaveholder] used to tie up to a joist, and whip upon her naked back till she was literally covered with blood."[1] This account clearly illustrates how poorly many slaveholders treated their slaves. Though the whipping was occasionally done out of pure pleasure on behalf of the slaveholder, oftentimes the torture was "warranted" in the eyes of the slaveholder. If certain rules or orders were not abided by, slaveholders would "teach" the slaves to follow orders by beating them.[2] It was this way that the slaveholders assumed their power over the slaves.

However, in the Jim Crow South era, free African Americans faced a wider range of tortures and felt insecure in their own homes. This time period saw a rise in the white supremacist group the Ku Klux Klan. Though the fundamental reason for the founding of the group was to scare African Americans from voting, the group saw a second phase in the late 1800s in which physical torture on free African Americans was prevalent.[3] "Raging crowds of white southerners publicly burned, mutilated, castrated, hanged, shot, and torturedmen, women, and children," which became a public spectacle for the white community.[4] Thousands of whites would gather and witness the horrible atrocities performed on innocent African Americans and cheer. Children attended the lynchings and many police authorities joined the masses and allowed the horrific actions to continue.[5] Even more surprising was the fact that "[t]he mayor gave the school children a holiday and the railroads ran excursion trains so that the people might see a human being

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