How Lynching Became a Tool To Destroy Black Competition

Maybe you didn’t know that one way lynching was used by whites was to destroy competition from Black business owners. Lynching may shed some light as to why African-Americans have failed to become as successful as many white Americans.

During the Jim Crow era white Americans destroyed prosperous Black businesses in many communities and used terroristic tactics to run the surviving family members from their homes and land.

The story of the murder of Elmore Bolling, a successful black businessman, by his jealous white neighbor in Alabama in 1949 was just a glimpse into a pattern of racist violence that terrorized African-Americans for generations.

One such incident took place in Memphis in 1892. A store called People’s Grocery, which was owned by a successful Black businessman, competed with a nearby white-owned shop. The People’s Grocery owner and two of his black employees were lynched by white marauders in a horrible assault that reverberated throughout the nation and wiped out the entrepreneurial spirit of many African-Americans in Memphis and elsewhere.

Ida B. Wells not only documented the extent of lynchings but even more importantly debunked the “rape myth”. Using statistics from white newspapers, Wells revealed that lynchings in the South had many causes, including the rising economic competition of African-Americans with whites.

Maintaining white supremacy and economic power was the overall motivating factor in the rise of lynchings of black men, women, and yes children!

This was the prevailing view at the turn of the 20th century that lynching of African-Americans was somehow justified.