Lynching in the United States in the context of "Lynching of Michael Donald"

The Great Migration, sometimes known as the Great Northward Migration or the Black Migration, was the movement of five million African Americans out of the rural Southern United States to the urban Northeast, Midwest, and West between 1910 and 1970. It was substantially caused by poor economic and social conditions due to prevalent racial segregation and discrimination in the Southern states where Jim Crow laws were upheld. In particular, continued lynchings motivated a portion of the migrants, as African Americans searched for social reprieve. The historic change brought by the migration was amplified because the migrants, for the most part, moved to the then-largest cities in the United States (New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Detroit, Cleveland, and Washington, D.C.) at a time when those cities had a central cultural, social, political, and economic influence over the United States; there, African Americans established culturally influential communities of their own. According to Isabel Wilkerson, despite the losses they felt leaving their homes in the South, and despite the barriers that the migrants faced in their new homes, the migration was an act of individual and collective agency, which changed the course of American history, a "declaration of independence" that was written by their actions.

From the earliest U.S. population statistics in 1780 until 1910, more than 90% of the African-American population lived in the American South, making up the majority of the population in three Southern states, namely Louisiana (until about 1890), South Carolina (until the 1920s), and Mississippi (until the 1930s). But by the end of the Great Migration, just over half of the African-American population lived in the South, while a little less than half lived in the North and West. Moreover, the African-American population had become highly urbanized. In 1900, only one-fifth of African Americans in the South were living in urban areas. By 1960, half of the African Americans in the South lived in urban areas, and by 1970, more than 80% of African Americans nationwide lived in cities. In 1991, Nicholas Lemann wrote:

The nadir of American race relations is a historical period defined by Rayford Logan to encompass a time considered the worst for race relations in the United States. This period coincided with the Gilded Age, and includes the legal solidification of Jim Crow laws after the Reconstruction era, as well as the rise of lynchings and racial massacres. Its exact date range is not uniform amongst historians.

Logan determined in his 1954 book The Negro in American Life and Thought: The Nadir, 1877–1901 as the period when "the Negro's status in American society" reached its lowest point. He argued for 1901 as its end, suggesting that race relations improved after that year; other historians, such as John Hope Franklin and Henry Arthur Callis, argued for dates as late as 1923. References to a nadir continued to be used; most notably, it is used in books by James W. Loewen as recently as 2006, and it is also used in books by other scholars. Loewen chooses later dates, arguing that the post-Reconstruction era was in fact one of widespread hope for racial equity due to idealistic Northern support for civil rights. In Loewen's view, the true nadir only began when Northern Republicans ceased supporting Southern Blacks' rights around 1890, and it lasted until the United States entered World War II in 1941. This period followed the financial Panic of 1873 and a continuing decline in cotton prices. It overlapped with both the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era, and was characterized by the nationwide sundown town phenomenon.

Lynching is an extrajudicial killing by a group. It is most often used to characterize informal public executions by a mob in order to punish an alleged or convicted transgressor or to intimidate others. It can also be an extreme form of informal group social control, and it is often conducted with the display of a public spectacle (often in the form of a hanging) for maximum intimidation. Instances of lynchings and similar mob violence can be found in all societies.

In the United States, where the word lynching likely originated, the practice became associated with vigilante justice on the frontier and mob attacks on African Americans accused of crimes. The latter became frequent in the South during the period after the Reconstruction era, especially during the nadir of American race relations. Black people were the primary victims of lynching in the U.S. (about 72% of the total), which was often perpetrated to enforce white supremacy and intimidate ethnic minorities along with other acts of racial terrorism.

The Chicago Defender is a Chicago-based online African-American newspaper. It was founded in 1905 by Robert S. Abbott and was once considered the "most important" newspaper of its kind. Abbott's newspaper reported and campaigned against Jim Crow-era violence and urged black people in the American South to settle in the north in what became the Great Migration. Abbott worked out an informal distribution system with Pullman porters who surreptitiously (and sometimes against southern state laws and mores) took his paper by rail far beyond Chicago, especially to African American readers in the Southern United States. Under his nephew and chosen successor, John H. Sengstacke, the paper dealt with racial segregation in the United States, especially in the U.S. military, during World War II. Copies of the paper were passed along in communities, and it is estimated that at its most successful, each copy was read by four to five people.

In 1919–1922, the Defender attracted the writing talents of Langston Hughes; from the 1940s through 1960s, Hughes wrote an opinion column for the paper. Washington, D.C., and international correspondent Ethel Payne, poet Gwendolyn Brooks, author Willard Motley, music critic Dave Peyton, journalists Ida B. Wells, L. Alex Wilson and Louis Lomax wrote for the paper at different times. During the height of the civil rights movement era, it was published as The Chicago Daily Defender, a daily newspaper, beginning in 1956. It became a weekly paper again in 2008.

The Atlanta Compromise (also known as accommodation or accommodationism) was a proposal put forth in 1895 by African American leader Booker T. Washington in a speech he gave at the Cotton States and International Exposition. He urged Black Southerners to accept segregation and to temporarily refrain from campaigning for equal rights, including the right to vote. In return, he advocated that Black people would receive basic legal protections, access to property ownership, employment opportunities, and vocational and industrial education. Upon the speech's conclusion, the white attendees gave Washington a standing ovation.

Under the direction of Washington's Tuskegee Machine organization, the Compromise was the dominant policy pursued by Black leaders in the South from 1895 to 1915. During this period, the educational infrastructure for Black people improved, with a focus on vocational schools and schools for children. However, Southern states continued to aggressively adopt Jim Crow laws which codified segregation in nearly all aspects of life. Violence against Black people continued: over fifty Black people were lynched most years until 1922. Beginning around 1910 – contrary to the advice offered by Washington in his speech – millions of African Americans began migrating northward, relocating to major urban centers in the North.