William Lynch speech

The William Lynch speech is an address purportedly delivered by William Lynch (or Willie Lynch) to an audience on the bank of the James River in Virginia in 1712 regarding control of slaves within the colony. The letter purports to be a verbatim account of a short speech given by a slave owner, in which he tells other slave masters that he has discovered the "secret" to controlling black slaves by setting them against one another. The document has been in print since at least 1970, but first gained widespread notice in the 1990s, when it appeared on the Internet. Since then, it has often been promoted as an authentic account of slavery during the 18th century, though its inaccuracies and anachronisms have led historians to conclude that it is a hoax.

Text

"Gentleman I greet you here on the bank of the James River in the year of our Lord, one thousand seven hundred and twelve. First I shall thank you, the Gentlemen of the Colony of Virginia, for bringing me here. I am here to help you solve some of your problems with slaves. Your invitation reached me on my modest plantation in the West Indies where I have experimented with some of the newest and still the oldest methods for control of slaves. Ancient Rome would envy us if my program is implemented. As our boat sailed south on the James River, named for our illustrious King James, whose bible we cherish, I saw enough to know that your program is not unique. While Rome used cords of wood as crosses for standing human bodies along the old highways in great numbers, you are here using the tree and the rope on occasion.

I caught the whiff of a dead slave hanging from a tree a couple of miles back. You are not only losing valuable stock by hangings, you are having uprisings, slaves are running away, your crops are sometimes left in the fields too long for maximum profit, you suffer occasional fires, your animals are killed, gentlemen...you know what your problems are; I do not need to elaborate. I am not here to enumerate your problems, I am here to introduce you to a method of solving them.

In my bag here, I have a fool-proof method for controlling your black slaves. I guarantee everyone of you that if installed correctly it will control the slaves for at least 300 years. My method is simple, any member of your family or any overseer can use it.

I have outlined a number of differences among the slaves, and I take these differences and make them bigger. I use fear, distrust, and envy for control purposes. These methods have worked on my modest plantation in the West Indies, and it will work throughout the South. Take this simple little test of differences and think about them. On the top of my list is "Age", but it is there because it only starts with an "A"; the second is "Color" or shade; there is intelligence, size, sex, size of plantations, attitude of owners, whether the slaves live in the valley, on a hill, East, West, North, South, have fine or coarse hair, or is tall or short. Now that you have a list of differences, I shall give you an outline of action--but before that, I shall assure you that distrust is stronger than trust, and envy is stronger than adulation, respect, or admiration.

The Black Slave, after receiving this indoctrination, shall carry on and will become self refueling and self generating for hundreds of years, maybe thousands.

Don't forget, you must pitch the old Black vs. the young Black male, and the young Black male against the old Black male. You must use the dark skinned slaves vs the light skinned slaves, and the light skinned slaves vs. the dark skinned slaves. You must use the female vs. the male, and the male vs. the female. You must also have your servants and overseers distrust all Blacks, but it is necessary that your slaves trust and depend on us. They must love, respect, and trust only us.

Gentlemen, these kits are your keys to control, use them. Have your wives and children use them. Never miss opportunity. My plan is guaranteed, and the good thing about this plan is that if used intensely for one year, the slaves themselves will remain perpetually distrustful."

The reputed narrator, William Lynch, identifies himself as the master of a "modest plantation" in the British West Indies who has been summoned to the Virginia Colony by local slaveowners to advise them on problems they have been having in managing their slaves. He briefly notes that their current violent method of handling unruly slaves – lynching, though the term is not used – is inefficient and counterproductive. Instead, he suggests that they adopt his method, which consists of exploiting differences such as age and skin color in order to pit slaves against each other. This method, he assures his hosts, will "...control the slaves for at least 300 years." Some online versions of the text attach introductions, such as a foreword attributed to Frederick Douglass, or citations falsely giving Lynch's name as the source of the word "lynching".

The text of the speech has been published since at least 1970. It appeared on the internet as early as 1993, when a reference librarian at the University of Missouri–St. Louis posted the document on the library's Gopher server. The librarian later revealed that she had obtained the document from the publisher of a local newspaper, The St. Louis Black Pages, in which the narrative had recently appeared. The librarian elected to leave the document on the Gopher server, as she believed that "even as an inauthentic document, it says something about the former and current state of African America", but added a warning about its provenance.

The text contains numerous anachronisms, including words and phrases such as "refueling" and "fool proof" which were not in use until the early 20th century. Additionally, historian Roy Rosenzweig notes that the divisions emphasized in the text – skin color, age, and gender – are distinctly 20th-century in nature, and make little sense in an 18th-century context. As such, historians such as Rosenzweig and William Jelani Cobb of Spelman College regard the William Lynch speech as a hoax.

Popular references

Louis Farrakhan, in his open letter regarding the Millions More Movement in 2005, cites Willie Lynch's scheme as an obstacle to unity among African Americans. Minister Farrakhan had previously quoted the speech at the Million Man March in October 1995, making the speech more well-known in the process. The speech was also quoted during the protests surrounding the 2001 presidential inauguration. The speech appears prominently in the 2005 direct-to-video film Animal, in which it is passed on between the generations of the characters. In the 2007 movie The Great Debaters, Denzel Washington's character Melvin B. Tolson refers to the Willie Lynch speech as containing the definition of the black slave.

Talib Kweli of Black Star references the speech in the song "RE:DEFinition."

William Lynch

Main article: William Lynch (Lynch law)

Forewords attached to some online versions of the speech credit the narrator's name as the source of the terms "lynching" and "Lynch law", despite the narrator specifically advocating against lynching. A man named William Lynch did indeed claim to have originated the term during the American Revolutionary War, but he was born in 1742, thirty years after the alleged delivery of the speech. A document published in the Southern Literary Messenger in 1836 that proposed William Lynch as the originator of "lynch law" may have been a hoax perpetrated by Edgar Allan Poe. A better documented early use of the term "Lynch law" comes from Charles Lynch, a Virginia justice of the peace and militia officer during the American Revolution.

References

• Rosenzweig, Roy (2001). "The Road to Xanadu: Public and Private Pathways on the History Web". The Journal of American History. 88 (2): 548–579. {{cite journal}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help); Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)

External links

• Lynch Letters
• Examination of text's inaccuracies by William Jelani Cobb
• Death of Willie Lynch Speech (Part I) by Prof. Manu Ampim