Democracy Abroad, Lynching At Home Analysis

“Democracy Abroad, Lynching at Home : Racial Violence in Florida” by Tameka Bradley Hobbs discusses the great lengths of horror that took place in the state of Florida. From the beginning Hobbs starts with the emotional story of Bernice Golden who discovered the body of her son hung in her mother's yard and was not convinced that her son had committed suicide as the law enforcement had suggested. This scene brought back memories of situations in the past in which a black man was hung by his white counterpart. These acts of lynching were common throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries with almost 5,000 African Americans losing their lives in these acts of racial terrorism. Hobbs states that while some methods of upholding the idea of white supremacy were on a downward trend the legal aspects or “legal lynchings” were increasing. Hobbs writes that “The focus of this study is to provide a detailed analysis of four lynchings that took place in the 1940’s.”
The first incident Hobbs analyzes is the lynching of Arthur C. Williams in Gadsden County, which was the first recorded lynching of the decade. Hobbs details

It forced those in the south to look at their treatment of African Americans in the light of their advertising of democracy to the outside world while they were killing off those who lived inside their own borders. Hobbs uses the quote of a famous scholar throughout the era to further push this point home with the quote stating “ To become the world's reformer, the United States must first democratize its domestic social and political institutions - to harmonize them with its self proclaimed global aspirations - for it is not possible to use the famous phrase, ‘to make the world safe for democracy’ as long as America itself was not genuinely