Lynching in America
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The Lynching of Robert Johnson

Lynching in America, also, The Lynching of Robert Johnson. Community Remembrance Project. Lynching in America. Between 1877 and 1950, thousands of African-Americans were the victims of lynching and racial violence in the United States. Florida had one of the highest per-capita rates of Black victims lynched by white mobs, including five known lynchings in Hillsborough County: Galloway (1892), John Crooms (1893), Lewis Jackson (1903), Samuel Arline (1912) and Robert Johnson (1934). Racial terror lynching was designed to instill fear into the Black community in order to maintain the racial hierarchy of white supremacy. It was not uncommon for law enforcement to hand Black people over to lynchers often without any show of force and indifferent to their legal duty to protect people in their custody. The racial caste system of the era diminished the value of Black life and empowered any white person to act as police, judge, jury, and executioner. This campaign of intimidation was aided by juries and public officials who granted impunity to white lynchers. Government officials frequently condoned or were indifferent to lynch mob violence. Many encouraged it. As a result, racial terror lynching plagued Florida and devastated African-American communities for decades, and many African-American families fled the South to Northern communities as refugees of racial terror. Although the number of documented lynchings is very likely an undercount of the total number of lynchings, at least 319 victims of racial terror lynching were killed in Florida., The Lynching of Robert Johnson. On January 30, 1934, Robert Johnson, a 40-year-old Black man, was lynched in Tampa. Two days earlier, Mr. Johnson had been wrongly arrested by the Hillsborough County constable after a white woman reported an assault. The next day, Tampa law enforcement officers confirmed Mr. Johnson's innocence and cleared him of any connection to the assault. However, rather than releasing Mr. Johnson, law enforcement officials turned Mr. Johnson over to an armed white man in the middle of the night who had no legal authority. This man was the brother of the Hillsborough County constable and falsely claimed to be a "deputy constable." A few hours later, he reported a mob lynching of Mr. Johnson, and Mr. Johnson's body was found shot to death near the Hillsborough River at Sligh Avenue. A coroner's jury concluded that no mob members could be identified and also that the constable's brother was not responsible for the murder. During this era, it was common for lynch mobs to forcibly kidnap their victims from police custody and also for law enforcement to actively participate in lynchings. This created a climate of racial terror from which Black people had no protection. In the end, no one was ever held accountable for lynching Robert Johnson. The racial terror violence and injustice that occurred in this community must never be forgotten.