Abstract
It would be disingenuous to say that violence and the fear of violence pervaded the lives of many African American children, but it is not presumptuous to say little is known about how terror impacted upon these children or how they responded to it. Over time, intimidating challenges to their mental and physical well being such as sales, threats of sales, and indiscriminate corporal punishment, subsided. By contrast, other forms of physical violence, especially rape and arbitrary killing or lynching, became even more serious threats well into the twentieth century.
The scale of this carnage means that, on the average, a black man, woman or child was [lynched] nearly once a week, every week, between 1882 and 1930 by a hate-driven white mob.
—Stewart E. Tolnay and E. M. Beck1
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Notes
Stewart E. Tolnay and E. M. Beck, A Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), ix;
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John Hope Franklin, “John Hope Franklin: A Life of Learning,” in Race and History: Selected Essays, 1938–1988 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1989), 281.
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© 2005 Wilma King
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King, W. (2005). African American Youth Face Violence and Fear of Violence in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century America. In: African American Childhoods. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-73165-7_9
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