Tragically, nearly 5000 Americans, a large majority of them African Americans, were lynched in the United States between 1882 and 1968. These murders took place across the United States and not just in the states that traditionally make up the American South (Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky). Because of this, the political conditions, cultural and societal conditions, and public memory construction/deconstruction conditions under which these lynchings are remembered can and will be different in each community, region, and state across the United States.
An example of these differences can be seen in a comparison of the political, cultural and societal, and public memory construction/deconstruction conditions between Duluth, Minnesota and Birmingham, Alabama. Duluth, located in Northern Minnesota on Lake Superior near the Canadian border, had three lynchings, which took on June 15, 1920 when a white mob lynched three African American men in the city. In Birmingham, a city founded in the aftermath of the American Civil War in the middle of Alabama, thirty-three people were lynched between 1883 and 1940. In the aftermath of the lynchings in both cities, there was a public memory constructed based on a desire to forget and move on.
In the early twenty-first century, the lynchings in both communities are remembered, or are starting to be remembered, by these communities. Groups in both communities have had to deconstruct and then reconstruct public memory, and all its contexts, to finally bring these lynchings into the light of history and public memory. Understanding these contexts, processes, and the differences associated with both cases is an important example in understanding how public memory can be used to serve a changing United States.
