Lincoln, Lynching, and the Long Way Home

The assassination of Abraham Lincoln 150 years ago this month was the precursor to the domestic terrorism that would be unleashed on black Americans for the next century.

Reconstruction was far more punitive than it would have been had Lincoln lived. In his second inaugural address, Lincoln had sent the message that there would not be retribution toward the South but rather reconciliation. In his closing remarks he had stated, "With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds." But Reconstruction as it was implemented after Lincoln's death rubbed the prospects of black equality in the faces of Southern whites, who were unwilling to concede social standing. Under widespread economic strain and federal occupation, whites blamed blacks as much as, if not more than, they did the North for Reconstruction.

In 1876, with the Hayes-Tilden Compromise, Reconstruction came to an end, and putting blacks back in their "natural" place became the priority throughout the South. White Democrats regained political power, Jim Crow laws were instituted, and lynching became the modus operandi to sustain the status quo of fear. From 1882 to 1968, there were nearly 200 anti-lynching bills introduced in Congress. Only three passed the House. They died in the Senate because Southern senators effectively filibustered the legislation. Seven presidents between 1890 and 1952 petitioned Congress to pass federal anti-lynching laws, to no avail.

The irony of Lincoln's death and the subsequent embrace of lynching is that black Americans were caught between the cross and the lynching tree. As explained by theologian James Cone, the cross and the lynching tree are held together by paradox.

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The Long Way Home is right, will we ever get there?