This research explores the correlations between more antiquated forms of African American lynchings and modern day forms of lynching which manifest in police brutality and unfair criminal justice practices which demonize people of color and disproportionately sentence black males to long jail sentences and capital punishment. While significant research has been conducted to demonstrate, in no uncertain terms, the disproportionate number of African Americans in general and African American males in particular who fall victim to police brutality and legal injustices, this research argues that these inequities and violations fulfill the same agendas and objectives of traditional lynchings. The research covers the history of lynching black people in America and the implications of such brutal practices in modern day society. Through analyzing the history and modern manifestations of lynchings in America, a picture emerges which helps to identify some of the systemic racial biases and issues inherent in the American justice system, and the reasons why there is a high degree of skepticism and mistrust between the American criminal justice system and African American communities. The research concludes that if the problem of systemic racism within the U.S. criminal justice system is recognized, education and awareness programs receive the funding and attention needed to properly inform the public regarding these inequities, and genuine efforts are made to create a criminal justice system that properly and proportionately reflects the populations being served, then healing can and will take place. It will require dedication to all of these areas, as well as consistency and time, for the hurt, frustrations, resentment, emotional wounds, and skepticism of hundreds of years of systemic oppression to begin to lessen. However, reconciliation and forgiveness are possible if we, as a collective people, dedicate ourselves to healing our nation.
About the Author: Try as I might, I am unable to separate my own experiences, emotions, sentiments and worldviews from the brute facts that shape my shared identity with my dark-skinned brothers and sisters located throughout the Americas. Even though the traditional forms of lynchings ended, for the most part, with the Civil Rights movements, a new phenomenon has crept in to further disenfranchise my black brothers and sisters. Police brutality and capital punishment serve the same basic function as lynchings and slavery - to oppress the African people and force us to live in a state of perpetual fear and servitude. True, I am an education historian who is privy to my responsibility to report facts in an unbiased manner; but I am also a human. I am someone who is intimately impacted by the long, arduous history of oppression my people have faced, and the current challenges that persist and threaten our safety in the 21st century. It is from the position of an African-American male, father, husband, uncle, child, grandchild, and member of a white-dominated cultural, political, and economic system that I write my book. Moreover, it is from the position of a man who had ten years of his life stolen from him by a corrupt justice system that I pen my words. Just after my 19th birthday, I was sentenced by the Virginia Federal Circuit Courts to a mandatory ten-year sentence for Conspiracy to Distribute Drugs. It was my first federal offense, but this did not matter. I spent ten full years of my life in a maximum security prison in Lewisburg, PA, and was released just shy of my 29th birthday. It is for all of us who have had our lives taken from us and our souls perpetually degraded by the double standards levied by mainstream society that I write my book.