Bearing Witness: by John Cole Vodicka
BEARING WITNESS... “While white mob violence against African Americans was an obsession in the South, it was not limited to that region. White supremacy was and is an American reality. Whites lynched Blacks in nearly every state, including New York, Minnesota, and California. Wherever Blacks were present in significant numbers, the threat of being lynched was always real. Blacks had to watch their step, no matter where they were in America. A Black man could be walking down the road, minding his business, and his life could suddenly change by meeting a white man or a group of white men or boys who on a whim decided to have some fun with a Negro; and this could happen in Mississippi or New York, Arkansas, or Illinois. By the 1890s, lynching fever gripped the South, spreading like cholera, as white communities made Blacks their primary target, and torture their focus. Burning the Black victim slowly for hours was the chief method of torture. Lynching became a white media spectacl
