WILLIE LYNCH

Willie Lynch

Willie Lynch

Introduction

William (Willie) Lynch, a British slave owner in the West Indies, and came to United States to advise American slave owners how to keep their slaves restrained, according to the essay in Brother Man: The Odyssey of Black Men in America- an Anthology. Lynching or Lynch Law is actually attributed to him. Lynching initially referred to the hanging of the black man. The William Lynch Speech or letter is from an unknown origin which attracted widespread attention when it was scattered on the internet by 1990s. It was said to be addressed to an audience on the bank of the James River in Virginia in 1712 regarding the control of slaves in the colony.

William Lynch was the speaker was summoned to Virginia in 1712, due to a few slave revolts in the area prior to his visit, and his dubious reputation of being an authoritative and strict slave owner. Believers in the substantiality of the William Lynch Speech called it mental slavery.

Discussion

Hatred among the slaves was a deep division in cognizance to skin color of the slaves; this was the cause of the Lynch's alleged method. Light-skinned blacks were priced better according to the conditions of slavery given to this doctrine. They were being allowed to do jobs that need power over the other slaves, and were usually assigned in the home of the slave master. While the dark-skinned slaves are bounded to the fields, performing back-breaking labors, and unlike the light-skinned, they cannot enjoy the luxury that the lighter-skinned slaves get.

The executions of Lynch's divide and conquer method of control caused discontent among the slaves. The division between the house and the field slaves is historically erroneous, since slaves that are employed in plantation households were a subset of non-predial slaves, including craftsman such as ...