Kentucky’s Dark History of Lynching By Dr. Marshall Myers
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hey are difficult and horrific to look back on. The stories of lynchings are reminders that there was a time in Kentucky history when a group of people were convinced, without a jury trial, that an individual was guilty of a “crime,” and the same group unlawfully hanged him. The prisoner was usually lodged in the county jail, where he awaited a trial by a 12-person jury. A group of local citizens would “convince” the jailer that it was in his best interest to unlock the prisoner’s cell. The unauthorized mob then dragged the prisoner out of jail cell and took him to a large tree, usually outside of town. With a rope on one end tied in a hangman’s knot, the mob put that end over the prisoner’s head as he sat upon a horse. The other end of the rope was thrown up over a low limb and tied securely. Next, someone slapped the prisoner’s horse on the flank and the horse ran riderless out from under the tree. That left the prisoner dangling from the rope a few feet off the ground. If lucky, the fall off the horse broke the prisoner’s neck; if not he strangled to death, emitting gags and guttural sounds. The executioners then let the prisoner wiggle and jump until he was dead and ceased all motion. The prisoner had paid the ultimate price for a crime that the community believes that he “committed,” all without a formal, legal trial that could declare that he was either innocent or guilty and then legally impose a sentence. Such lawless acts were outside the law and were called lynchings. Rarely were any of the mob punished. Kentucky, like its Southern neighbors, was a hotbed of lynching in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when a
person, who oftentimes was African American, could be lynched for a number of “crimes”: lack of “respect” of white people, murder, the rape of a white woman, flirting with a white woman, not knowing his place in society, or even general mischief. Almost any crime was grounds for a lynching. Whatever the lynchers saw as a “crime,” the lynchers imposed their own punishment in the form of “rough justice.” Granted, if a posse, duly formed and authorized, “accidentally” killed an escaped prisoner, that was not technically “lynching,” yet it also was a form of “rough justice.” Lynching reached its height in Kentucky between 1891 and 1895, a five-year span when 64 people were lynched, much like the rest of the South at the same time. According to George Wright’s study of racial violence in the Commonwealth, including lynchings, Wright puts the figures for lynching in Kentucky between 1860 and 1939, by races as 100 African Americans, 89 whites, and six people identified only as an “unknown” race. The newspaper, the CourierJournal, however, disputes some of those figures and says that 186 African Americans were lynched in Kentucky between 1877 and 1934.
What Did Local Papers Say About These Lynchings? While many county and local newspapers recognized that the mob’s actions were outside the law, a number of papers were generally supportive of the lynchings. In Bowling Green, for instance, an editor said that “there can be no question as to [the prisoner’s] guilt, and though his punishment was not brought about according to the form of the law, all will admit that it Fall 2021
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