“Get on the Ground and We Will Kick Your Head In”"Between 1882 and 1964, nearly five thousand people died from lynching, the majority African-American. The 1890s witnessed the worst period of lynching in U.S. history. The grim statistical record almost certainly understates the story. Many lynchings were not recorded outside their immediate locality, and pure numbers do not convey the brutality of lynching. Lynchings, often witnessed by large crowds of white onlookers, were the most extreme form of Southern white control over the African-American population, regularly meted out against African Americans who had been falsely charged with crimes but in fact were achieving a level of political or economic autonomy that whites found unacceptable. Lynching was especially prevalent in areas of low population density, recent increase in black population, and high rates of transiency, where strangers feared one another and whites judged legitimate law enforcement weak. As the following testimony by a Birmingham, Alabama, newspaper reporter to a 1949 House subcommittee shows, acts of violence by vigilante groups in the South were directed not only toward blacks. The virulently anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic, and anti-foreigner Ku Klux Klan of the 20th century violently attempted to impose its code of morality on men, women, and children who violated their beliefs of community norms. "