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F ifty years ago this month, President Lyndon B. Johnson called for a “War on Crime,” a declaration that ushered in a new era of American law enforcement.
In the United States, during the decades after the Civil War, African Americans were the main victims of racial lynching, but in the American Southwest, Mexican Americans were also the targets of lynching as well.
- What Is A "War on Crime"?
- Why A War on Crime?
- Correlation Between National and Local Government
President Lyndon Johnson declared a national "War on Crime" on March 8, 1965, shortly after his declaration of a War on Poverty. Johnson labeled crime a crippling epidemic hindering the progress of the nation. That being said, the target of the War on Crime was not merely criminal behavior, but rather the sociological and economic factors that the ...
Ironically, the national War on Crime did not correspond with any hike in the crime rate. Instead, the War on Crime was a public policy initiative started in part to expand federal powers. Lyndon Johnson’s liberal administration believed in expanding the executive branch of the government in order to establish his ‘Great Society.’ Thus, the War on ...
The policies initiated by the federal government under Lyndon Johnson quickly trickled down into local governments across the country. Local police departments received exorbitant amounts of government funding contingent on the following of national policy. Community-improvement programs, officer training regimens, and the daily tasks of law enforc...
Lynchings were violent public acts that white people used to terrorize and control Black people in the 19th and 20th centuries, particularly in the South. Lynchings typically evoke images of Black men and women hanging from trees, but they involved other extreme brutality, such as torture, mutilation, decapitation, and desecration.
The Mahmudiyah rape and killings were a series of war crimes committed by five U.S. Army soldiers during the U.S. occupation of Iraq, involving the gang-rape and murder of 14-year-old Iraqi girl Abeer Qassim Hamza al-Janabi and the murder of her family on March 12, 2006.
Adding to the racial tension were a disturbing number of high-profile black-on-white crimes, such as the brutal stabbing, rape, and murder of Catherine “Kitty” Genovese in March 1964 by Winston Moseley, who later confessed to killing two other women and committing at least 30 burglaries.
Reconstruction in America shows how the promises of Emancipation were betrayed by racial violence and terrorism. EJI’s new report, Reconstruction in America, documents nearly 2,000 more confirmed racial terror lynchings of Black people by white mobs in America than previously detailed.
