Racial Terror Awareness

Violence has long been used to control and intimidate minority groups in the United States. This hostility has targeted at a wide array of nonwhite people: Native Americans, Asians, Mexicans and especially African Americans. The mold was set during slavery when slaveholders resorted to physical coercion to enforce human bondage. After the Civil War, with the founding of the Ku Klux Klan, vigilantism served the same purpose of maintaining the old racial hierarchy. From the 1870s to the 1950s, an estimated 4,400 African Americans were lynched without a trial, mostly in the states of the former Confederacy. During the same decades, mob violence rained down on scores of Black communities in the South and elsewhere. The causes varied, from political coups in Louisiana and North Carolina to conflicts over segregation in Illinois and Texas to hysteria over crime in Georgia and Oklahoma to economic competition in Arkansas and Pennsylvania. Whatever the spark, these acts of racial terror killed hundreds of African Americans and destroyed millions of dollars‘ worth of residential and commercial property. 


To reckon with this history is to face it fully. Watch the documentary below to hear the voices, see the places, and understand the enduring impact of racial terror in America.