Carl Hiaasen: Racial lynchings, our own history of terrorism
Their fingers were hacked off and given out as souvenirs. Next their ears were chopped from their heads. A mob beat the man while a crowd of hundreds watched.
A large corkscrew was then used to mutilate both captives, who were tossed onto a fire and burned. While all this was happening, the onlookers — which included women and children — were served lemonade and deviled eggs.
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They carved out his eyes before ramming the poker down his throat, castrating him and “burning him alive over a slow fire.”
In 1904, a black man in Reevesville, S.C., was lynched for knocking on the door of a white woman’s house.
In 1919, a black soldier named William Little returned from World War I to his home in Blakely, Ga. He was lynched after refusing to take off his Army uniform.
In 1940, in Luverne, Alabama, a black man named Jesse Thornton was lynched because he didn’t use the word “mister” when speaking about a white police officer.