Racially-motivated murders, or lynchings, weren't strictly a southern phenomenon. They've been documented across the Midwest, too, including in Marshall and Fulton counties right here in Central Illinois.
Hannah Rea is an assistant producer with The African American Midwest. In an interview with WCBU's Tim Shelley, Rea explains the history of Midwestern lynchings, and why she is mapping the known incidents.
HANNAH REA: I'm a native Hoosier. I grew up in Lawrenceburg. It's down by Cincinnati across the Ohio River. And I had always grown up thinking that lynching was a Southern only phenomenon. You know, living across from Kentucky, there was sort of this unspoken knowledge of like, yeah, there was slavery over there. But this is the good part of America, you know, this is the land of the free, this is the North.
But really, there have been, there was indentured servitude and forms of slavery here. And there was also racially motive motivated violence, including lynchings. So we identified 225 cases of lynching in the Midwest. Now, that is not a definitive number, because it's impossible to tell, because a lot of cases went unreported. But we identified 20 Black men in Illinois who were lynched between 1837 and 1943.
And I think there's this idea that it is just a southern only phenomenon, but where you have African American population in America, unfortunately, you have the same sort of bias and violence from white neighbors that is going to follow them wherever they try and make their home.
TIM SHELLEY: What do you think it does for people to take this information and display it in a visual format, where they can see kind of geographically where these incidents took place?
HR: I think it's shocking. And I think that's part of the reason that we wanted to do it, is to show people that this happened in your backyard. This is not a southern phenomenon. It's an American phenomenon.
And we need to confront that. And we can't continue to sweep it under the rug. And a point that I wanted to make was specifically about showing photographs, because that's a that's a very highly debated issue, of showing photographs of lynching victims. But, you know, we debated over it, and we decided that we had to we put content warnings, warning people that there was graphic content on the site, but to not show those photographs would be to continue to look away. And this is something that we need to look directly at. And it is horrifying. It's really hard to look at.
But there was a trend. That's not just the southern end, it's an American trend of taking photographs of lynchings and circulating them as souvenirs, photographs, postcards, bits of clothing items from the victim. And it's dehumanizing and degrading even after death. It's very hard to confront that. But I think it's important that we all do.
TS: What lessons you think somebody can today can take away from this? They might look at this and say, oh, you know, the last one happened in 1943. This is something that happened in the past. What would you say to a thought like that?
HR: So I would say that lynching is not a thing of the past. lynching happens today. Be it actual acts of lynching. Most recently, there was a lynching of a Black man in Iowa that happened in 2020. And lynching itself wasn't made a federal crime until 2020.
And I think that's really exemplary of this idea that we have, especially white Americans like myself, where we have this idea that it's thing of the past, and we don't need to worry about it, because it doesn't happen anymore. But there is lynching by another name. And that is racially-motivated violence. So it may not be the act of hanging someone from a tree.
But recently, for example, 2021 was the worst year on record so far for violence against Black trans individuals. In the Midwest, there were at least seven trans women murdered. Four of them were in Illinois. One was in Cincinnati, another was in Missouri. And that is just lynching by another name. It's racially motivated. It's motivated by gender and sexuality. It's discrimination. And lynching isn't always so clear cut, as the definition we have of this is something I see in my history textbook. This is something that if we don't confront will continue to be swept under the rug and continue to be ignored and only get worse.
TS: How can we begin to confront that, perhaps better than we are doing so far as a society today?
HR: I would say the answer for that is twofold. One is to educate ourselves about both past lynchings, to know the names of the victims to know when they happened, the context of why they happened. And then I think the second part would be to talk to the African American community and try and figure out what's the best way that we can support and elevate African American voices, because ultimately, they are the ones ones who need to be in control of their own fate and be in control. We need to know what they need from us.
