Background:
In the 17th and 18th centuries, racism was prominent because of the involvement of the British Empire in the colonies. The British were extremely racist toward African Americans because to them, black skin was generally associated with bad things, like evil and filth (Rudd, Hanes, and Hermsen) . This view was brought to the colonies along with them. Slavery was decided by race in the late 17th century. Against their will, African Americans were brought to North America through an …show more content…
This did not make it any easier for blacks to stop white persecution because they had no part in these decisions. Whites subjected blacks to random and violent lynchings. Lynchings occurred when a large mob of white people accused a black person of a wrongdoing that sometimes was not true. These wrong doings could range anywhere from a federal crime to a little mistake that offended a white person. This mob would seek out the accused and ultimately kill them (Zangrando). Though lynching was usually for blacks, sometimes a white person would also die due to lynching. This act of lynching gave whites total control over blacks by establishing white supremacy. Between 1880 and 1930, 3,200 blacks were killed in the South, seven in the Northeast, seventy-nine in the Midwest, and thirty-eight in the Far West (Ogletree