Original sentence: After the 1915 release of the movie The Birth of a Nation, which glorified the Reconstruction-era Klan, the Klan re-formed and re-adopted lynching as a means to socially, economically, and politically terrorize and paralyze black populations.Lynch Law, a form of mob violence and putative justice, usually involving (but by no means restricted to) the illegal hanging of suspected criminals, was common in the Southern United States from the mid-19th to the mid-20th centuries.Members of mobs that participated in these public murders often took photographs of what they had done, and those photographs, distributed on postcards, were collected by James Allen who has now published them online , and written words to accompany the images.The executions of 4,743 people who were lynched in the United States between 1882 and 1968 were not often publicized
Edited sentence: After the 1915 release of the movie The Birth of a Nation, which glorified the Reconstruction-era Klan, the Klan re-formed and re-adopted lynching as a means to socially, economically, and politically terrorize and paralyze black populations, in support of a white supremacist status quo.Lynch Law—a form of mob violence and putative justice, usually involving (but by no means restricted to) the illegal hanging of suspected criminals—cast its pall over the Southern United States from the mid-19th to the mid-20th centuries.Members of mobs that participated in these public murders often took photographs of what they had done, and those photographs, distributed on postcards, were collected by James Allen who has now published them online , and written words to accompany the shocking images.The murders of 4,743 people who were lynched in the United States between 1882 and 1968 were not often publicized