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Hey, history lovers. I'm Mike Rosenwald with Retropod, a show about the past, rediscovered.

Lynching is a horrific and shameful part of American history.

Though lynching had existed before the Civil War,

that violent expression of racism rose to prominence after the fighting ended.

And get this.

It's still legal.

That's right.

More than 150 years after the emancipation proclamation and decades after the civil

rights movement, this horrific act is still technically legal under federal law, despite debate over its lawfulness

stretching back to the 1800s.

After the end of the Civil War came reunification. After reunification,

came reconstruction. The era that was supposed to reintegrate

the South back into the Union and rebuild the country with an equal place for free African Americans.

It didn't happen that way. The backlash in the South was swift and ferocious, and violence became a key

tool to reestablishing white supremacy. By 1865, six Confederate veterans in Tennessee had formed

what became the Ku Klux Klan. In less than a year, chapters had sprung up across the state before spreading further.

According to the Equal Justice Initiative, during the 1868 presidential election,

violent attacks in several southern states resulted in hundreds of deaths and prevented black people from casting a single vote in many counties with significant black populations.

And lynching became a tool of this terror,

as reconstruction gave way to intimidation, segregation, and Jim Crow laws.

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