Lynching forcibly transferred black wealth to white perpetrators

Evidence

A recent study conducted by Shytierra Gaston at Georgia State University reinforces the idea that lynching was used as a tool to instill fear, seize property, and reinstate white supremacy. The study found that of a subset of twenty-two lynching victims who were killed in the South between 1883 and 1972, most of their families, like Betty Moss and her children, and Ida B. Wells, were forced to leave “behind their social capital, support systems, resources, and wealth.” White Americans like William Barrett, who were responsible for such lynchings, more often than not wound up taking possession of their victims’ property. Because the victims’ families had been forced to flee “with little other than the clothes on their backs,” their ability to build wealth was disrupted. They were forced to start over from scratch, plunging them further behind their white peers financially. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 305

Categorization

• DEFINE: Distinguishes lynching’s function from its common moral framing: not hate crime but wealth-transfer mechanism.
• XREF: connects to: Lynching sites remain alive as present-day property-based harms for black families — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations: How Building a…, 439