After the Union won the Civil War and slavery was legally ended in the United States, prejudice on the part of white Americans against African-Americans persisted. One of the manifestations of this prejudice was the abduction and murder of African-Americans, called lynching. Lynching was a practice designed to keep African-Americans in terror, bullying them to submit to the white populace.
According to the NAACP, between 1882-1968, 4,743 lynchings occurred in the United States, the majority of them in the South. If an African-American person was considered "uppity" (a vague, pejorative phrase that included being economically successful, looking at or associating with white women, or refusing to accept the racist status quo), they might be suddenly dragged from their home by a white mob, tortured, and then killed. Records exist of lynching victims being shot, dragged behind cars, set on fire with gasoline, and executed in other horrific ways, though the most common method of murder was to hang the person from a tree via a noose. (The noose has become a symbol of lynching and racist violence.) In some cases, the body of a lynched person was displayed for days.
It is important to note that lynching occurred outside of the legal system: lynching victims had committed no legally recognized crime. The families and friends of lynching victims often tried to appeal to the legal system to bring the murderers to justice, but the majority-white legal system ignored the testimony of the African-Americans who were witnesses and victims to the crime and refused to prosecute the white people who had killed them. Disturbingly, lynching was often a public spectacle, with the murderers taking photographs of themselves with the victim's body and celebrating the victim's death.
Though the race of the dead man whom Myop finds is indeterminate due to the decomposition of his corpse, the noose found nearby suggests that he was a victim of lynching and was, therefore, African American. Myop's discovery increases her awareness of the horrific history of lynching.
