Lynching split from Learning From the Germans: Confronting Race and the Memory of Evil by Susan Neiman

Matt McKeon

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I think vandalism of any monument or marker is deeply troubling. Or of any object, not even one of historical significance, even done with zero political motive. That casual grafitti and vandalism has been long tolerated helped get us to the point where we are now.

Why was Emmett Till lynched? He (alleged) did something a portion of society considered wrong. Those offended felt authorities would not act, or they were impatient and didn't want to wait.

Why are statues being vandalized and torn down by mobs? They represent something portion of society considers wrong. Those offended feel authorities will not act, or they are tired of waiting for action.

The groups are of opposite beliefs. The lynching of a person is certainly worse than the lynching of an inanimate object. But they come from the same place: an angry mob taking the law into their own hands.
This post has some problems.

You are "disturbed" by vandalism of monuments. Sure. But some of our friends have differing levels of "concern" ranging from rage/despair, the world is coming to an end to meh, who cares. That turns out to be dependent on race.

Why was Emmett Till lynched? About nothing actually. But two men could take him from his home, in front of his family, torture him, shoot him and throw his body away like a bag of garbage in the absolute and as it turns out justified confidence they would suffer zero consequences. That turns out to be dependent on race as well.

Why were people lynched in the South, generally. Was it because the populace thought criminals wouldn't be punished? No, the law came down extraordinarily hard on blacks accused on crimes. Lynching was sending a message. If lynching was a response to the authorities not doing their duty, then there should have been 2000 cases of mobs of blacks lynching whites, not the other way around. Lynching is about race.

People have been vandalizing and wrecking the statues and monuments symbolizing the Confederacy and white supremacy. Its not pretty, I certainly don't support it, but to call knocking down a piece a stonework and the prolonged torture-murder of a real person by the same word: lynch. I suggest that you have another think about that. I know you are a thinking person.

Especially since the torture-murder was in the service of maintaining a regime propped up by torture/murder. And knocking down a statue of a Confederate general is in the service of creating a society that is not propped up by people getting killed, and their killers not facing consequences.
 

Joshism

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Why was Emmett Till lynched? About nothing actually. But two men could take him from his home, in front of his family, torture him, shoot him and throw his body away like a bag of garbage in the absolute and as it turns out justified confidence they would suffer zero consequences. That turns out to be dependent on race as well.

Why were people lynched in the South, generally. Was it because the populace thought criminals wouldn't be punished? No, the law came down extraordinarily hard on blacks accused on crimes. Lynching was sending a message. If lynching was a response to the authorities not doing their duty, then there should have been 2000 cases of mobs of blacks lynching whites, not the other way around. Lynching is about race.

People have been vandalizing and wrecking the statues and monuments symbolizing the Confederacy and white supremacy. Its not pretty, I certainly don't support it, but to call knocking down a piece a stonework and the prolonged torture-murder of a real person by the same word: lynch. I suggest that you have another think about that. I know you are a thinking person.

Especially since the torture-murder was in the service of maintaining a regime propped up by torture/murder. And knocking down a statue of a Confederate general is in the service of creating a society that is not propped up by people getting killed, and their killers not facing consequences.
As I said in my last post: "The lynching of a person is certainly worse than the lynching of an inanimate object."

Indeed Southern whites operated largely with impunity. But they clearly felt the need to send a message without waiting for legal government action to send a message, or thought that message wasn't strong enough.

Few, if any, people who have defaced or destroyed monuments will be punished for their actions. Maybe some of the looters, if we're lucky. I knew someone a decade ago who had been arrested more than once for protesting; an overnight in jail didn't phase her at all.

We shouldn't say "this action is endorsed by the system so it's bad, but this action fights the system so it's good." It comes down to if people, especially in mob for, are allowed to take the law into their own hands. The principle of the thing.

In the South, lynching didn't actually care if the victim had committed a crime. The allegation was enough. Today, the mobs aren't limiting themselves to Confederate statues. Grant owned a slave. Washington owned a slave. I'm sure you could whip of these crowds into attacking a statue simply by claiming the individual depicted owned a slave, even if they never did. Lincoln didn't believe in racial equality, let's attack him. Any statue of a white person some excuse can be concocted why it should come down. That's how mobs work. There is no endgame, just keep moving the goalposts to find new targets.

It should be noted that while Southern mobs usually targeted blacks, sometimes they lynched whites for non-racial crimes too. The first lynching (and the only one I know of) in what is now Palm Beach County was in 1895. A mob traveled 80 miles from Miami (it was all one county at the time) to lynch a murderer, who was white, held in the little county jail, lest he escape.

A functioning society cannot tolerate mobs. It doesn't matter if they're stringing up teenagers, pulling down statues, burning books, or guarding a cemetery against imagined threats.
 

Matt McKeon

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As I said in my last post: "The lynching of a person is certainly worse than the lynching of an inanimate object."

Indeed Southern whites operated largely with impunity. But they clearly felt the need to send a message without waiting for legal government action to send a message, or thought that message wasn't strong enough.

Few, if any, people who have defaced or destroyed monuments will be punished for their actions. Maybe some of the looters, if we're lucky. I knew someone a decade ago who had been arrested more than once for protesting; an overnight in jail didn't phase her at all.

We shouldn't say "this action is endorsed by the system so it's bad, but this action fights the system so it's good." It comes down to if people, especially in mob for, are allowed to take the law into their own hands. The principle of the thing.

In the South, lynching didn't actually care if the victim had committed a crime. The allegation was enough. Today, the mobs aren't limiting themselves to Confederate statues. Grant owned a slave. Washington owned a slave. I'm sure you could whip of these crowds into attacking a statue simply by claiming the individual depicted owned a slave, even if they never did. Lincoln didn't believe in racial equality, let's attack him. Any statue of a white person some excuse can be concocted why it should come down. That's how mobs work. There is no endgame, just keep moving the goalposts to find new targets.

It should be noted that while Southern mobs usually targeted blacks, sometimes they lynched whites for non-racial crimes too. The first lynching (and the only one I know of) in what is now Palm Beach County was in 1895. A mob traveled 80 miles from Miami (it was all one county at the time) to lynch a murderer, who was white, held in the little county jail, lest he escape.

A functioning society cannot tolerate mobs. It doesn't matter if they're stringing up teenagers, pulling down statues, burning books, or guarding a cemetery against imagined threats.
If you want to group thousands of murdered people with a few statues and somehow make that the same thing, I don't know what to say.

A functioning society cannot tolerate mobs? But it can tolerate lynching, and did for a century.

Society can't tolerate pulling down statues? It could tolerate Till's memorial being vandalized and knocked down for decades.

Armed militias at Gettysburg, driving out legitimate visitors? It can tolerate that.

Choking people to death? Yeah, its okay, I guess. If the right people are doing the choking, and the right people are getting choked.

People of color, protesting against racism and injustice? Sir, you have gone too far! That is a horse of a different color!(so to speak). Society is crumbling!
 

Jim Klag

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And some of them in an illegal way
That is a deliberate distraction - saying protesters are unlawful. The people committing the illegal acts of vandalism and looting are not the protesters, but are criminals taking advantage of the protesters' diverting the attention of law enforcement and I think you know that. Tearing down a statue of a person the protesters don't like is as old as protesting itself and as old as the display of statues. Opponents of Pericles tore down statues in Athens and Romans were always tearing down each other's statues. American colonists tore down statues of George III and burned down the houses of royal governors and tarred and feathered tax collectors. The people who are loudest in trying to put down protesters today are the very people who used to bomb black churches and lynch black people and intimidate black folks trying to vote and burn crosses all over the south and fire water cannons at blacks while their dogs attacked them. You cannot protest without ruffling some feathers. What you should be protesting is a president who uses police to bludgeon protestors out of the way so he can have a photo OP or skin head thugs showing up heavily armed at places where peaceful protests are going on.
 

Joshism

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American colonists tore down statues of George III and burned down the houses of royal governors and tarred and feathered tax collectors.
Tarring and feathering was quite horrific, and I don't think that's properly appreciated by most today.

Attacking royal governors and pulling down statues of King George III (before or after a war broke out?) were attacks on the government that was the source of the then current grievances.

Given that the greatest present grievance (and inciting incident of not only this round of protests, but the previous round after Ferguson) involves racism by police there is a remarkable lack of violence against the police or the government.

Like I said, you could not be more wrong. It was technically illegal everywhere and yet it went on for a whole century. This could not possibly have kept going without at least implied acceptance from everybody. Very few people publicly protested lynching anywhere. Even the churches were mostly silent.
Are there lynching statistics by state available?

Has anyone here read any books on lynching, particularly by Michael Pfeifer? We've got a lot of back and forth on the level of acceptability and protest without any sources.

Lynching seems a rather difficult problem to stop once started. If a portion of the populace is willing to lynch minorities they think are criminal or otherwise out of line why shouldn't they also lynch any public figures who speak out against them? I imagine the conversation, literal or symbolicly implied, goes something like this: "I hear you don't like lynching. Sounds like the talk of a communist [expletive]-lover. You know what we do with that kind of person 'round here?"
 

O' Be Joyful

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Since we seem to be "hung-up" on the subject of lynching, I give you the thoughts upon it by Ida B. Wells that were almost exclusivley printed in the Black press:


(snip)

Beginning in 1892 with the destruction of her newspaper, the Memphis Free Speech, Ida B. Wells for the next forty years was the most prominent opponent of lynching in the United States. What follows is a speech she made to a Chicago audience on the subject in January 1900.
Our country’s national crime is lynching. It is not the creature of an hour, the sudden outburst of uncontrolled fury, or the unspeakable brutality of an insane mob. It represents the cool, calculating deliberation of intelligent people who openly avow that there is an “unwritten law” that justifies them in putting human beings to death without complaint under oath, without trial by jury, without opportunity to make defense, and without right of appeal. The “unwritten law” first found excuse with the rough, rugged, and determined man who left the civilized centers of eastern States to seek for quick returns in the gold-fields of the far West. Following in uncertain pursuit of continually eluding fortune, they dared the savagery of the Indians, the hardships of mountain travel, and the constant terror of border State outlaws.
Naturally, they felt slight toleration for traitors in their own ranks. It was enough to fight the enemies from without; woe to the foe within! Far removed from and entirely without protection of the courts of civilized life, these fortune-seekers made laws to meet their varying emergencies. The thief who stole a horse, the bully who “jumped” a claim, was a common enemy. If caught he was promptly tried, and if found guilty was hanged to the tree under which the court convened.
Those were busy days of busy men. They had no time to give the prisoner a bill of exception or stay of execution. The only way a man had to secure a stay of execution was to behave himself. Judge Lynch was original in methods but exceedingly effective in procedure. He made the charge, impaneled the jurors, and directed the execution. When the court adjourned, the prisoner was dead. Thus lynch law held sway in the far West until civilization spread into the Territories and the orderly processes of law took its place. The emergency no longer existing, lynching gradually disappeared from the West.
But the spirit of mob procedure seemed to have fastened itself upon the lawless classes, and the grim process that at first was invoked to declare justice was made the excuse to wreak vengeance and cover crime. It next appeared in the South, where centuries of Anglo-Saxon civilization had made effective all the safeguards of court procedure. No emergency called for lynch law. It asserted its sway in defiance of law and in favor of anarchy. There it has flourished ever since, marking the thirty years of its existence with the inhuman butchery of more than ten thousand men, women, and children by shooting, drowning, hanging, and burning them alive. Not only this, but so potent is the force of example that the lynching mania has spread throughout the North and middle West. It is now no uncommon thing to read of lynchings north of Mason and Dixon’s line, and those most responsible for this fashion gleefully point to these instances and assert that the North is no better than the South.
 

Matt McKeon

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Who's exaggerating? Wider society was complicit in lynching by their failure to make any serious effort to stop it.
I agree. There were several attempts to pass federal anti-lynch laws, legislation that would attack the problem: but nope, the majority of our elected representatives judged, no doubt correctly it was not important enough to their constitutents, to deal with.

As one military leader once said: "the conduct you ignore, is the conduct you accept."
 

byron ed

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...zero clout means there was zero change resulting from their actions...
...and yet beginning with Grant there were specific actions against the KKK and lynching, and other actions by some states as well, right through the Jim Crow era. People were apprehended, tried, and put in jail. That's not zero change, it's merely not enough change.

You want to exaggerate to say there was zero impact of noted anti-lynching speakers simply because they weren't on your history radar, zero reinforcement of lynch laws simply because you personally havent scanned the period media to see cases where lynchers were put in jail or new lynch laws put in place, and you've decided that it was society on the whole that "allowed" lynching to occur when we all know it was a disfunctional segment of society -- the white Jim Crow southerns -- that propagated nearly all the lynching.

The realistic statement "there wasn't enough done" just won't do for you. For you it just has to be that "zero" was done and that society as a whole was responsible for it. This is where you should ask yourself, why you so want it to have been that way?

On the other site it often happened that to distract from the culpability of the white South; slavery itself was posed to be the crime of the whole nation despite the majority of slavery and the meanest of slavery by far prevailing and surviving only in the south. I'm suspecting that's what's going on here; the "mommy, Billy did it too" thing, to be able to say the sound bite "we all are equally culpable for lynching."

Fact is, to stamp out lynching would have required suspending some legality, a big reason "not enough was done."
 
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byron ed

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I have been reading your thoughts for quite some time. Here and on CWT -- which is why I am surprised on your opinion on Lynchings in America...They were indeed accepted...

...the vast majority does nothing in it's power to stop, convict and call out those who participate and commit those lynchings --- that means it's acceptable.

When communities come together to see someone lynched - it's accepted. When people travel and sell tickets to see someone lynched -- it's acceptable. Itwasn't just a dysfunctional segment of the society -- it was an accepted...
Or, we'll calmly review the lynch record and note that the vast majority of them were in the Jim Crow south. That's not the majority society of the U.S.

Lynching was illegal everywhere by the consent of majority society. The effort made by noted figures in the U.S., particularly African American notables as listed above, will not be dismissed.

Suspension of legality would have been necessary to effectively quash the tide of lynchings. As you know they were done under cover of mask and crowds.

So let me be clear on my view of it, lynching was awful and not enough was done about it -- because unlike what was was tried during prohibition simply going after them for taxes just wasn't going to work.

Bottom line most of society couldn't do much about lynching. That would be southern population and their representatives letting up on their Jim Crow resistance in the U.S. Congress.
 

Matt McKeon

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...and yet beginning with Grant there were specific actions against the KKK and lynching, and other actions by some states as well, right through the Jim Crow era. People were apprehended, tried, and put in jail. That's not zero change, it's merely not enough change.

You want to exaggerate to say there was zero impact of noted anti-lynching speakers simply because they weren't on your history radar, zero reinforcement of lynch laws simply because you personally havent scanned the period media to see cases where lynchers were put in jail or new lynch laws put in place, and you've decided that it was society on the whole that "allowed" lynching to occur when we all know it was a disfunctional segment of society -- the white Jim Crow southerns -- that propagated nearly all the lynching.

The realistic statement "there wasn't enough done" just won't do for you. For you it just has to be that "zero" was done and that society as a whole was responsible for it. This is where you should ask yourself, why you so want it to have been that way?

On the other site it often happened that to distract from the culpability of the white South; slavery itself was posed to be the crime of the whole nation despite the majority of slavery and the meanest of slavery by far prevailing and surviving only in the south. I'm suspecting that's what's going on here; the "mommy, Billy did it too" thing, to be able to say the sound bite "we all are equally culpable for lynching."

Fact is, to stamp out lynching would have required suspending some legality, a big reason "not enough was done."
Periodical mob action by whites against blacks in the Jim Crow period is how that society functioned. Lynching was a feature not a bug.
 

Matt McKeon

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Or, we'll calmly review the lynch record and note that the vast majority of them were in the Jim Crow south. That's not the majority society of the U.S.

Lynching was illegal everywhere by the consent of majority society. The effort made by noted figures in the U.S., particularly African American notables as listed above, will not be dismissed.
This
Suspension of legality would have been necessary to effectively quash the tide of lynchings. As you know they were done under cover of mask and crowds.

So let me be clear on my view of it, lynching was awful and not enough was done about it -- because unlike what was was tried during prohibition simply going after them for taxes just wasn't going to work.

Bottom line most of society couldn't do much about lynching. That would be southern population and their representatives letting up on their Jim Crow resistance in the U.S. Congress.
"The bottom line most of society couldn't do much about lynching" With respect society didn't do much about lynching. Until we did. Not the same.

To get back to my original point. The various folks in hysterics about statues were remarkably calm about vandalism done to non whites. Which makes me less sympathetic to the whole "erasing history" crowd.
 

Matt McKeon

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I recently came across an article where a local white man struck and killed a black woman at night with his automobile. He claimed it was an accident and he didn't see the woman until too late. An inquest was not held "at the request of the family." The man was on the town council.

Was the family pressured to protect the councilor? Were they protecting the woman from embarrassment because she was drunk at the time? Neither? Not enough information to determine and no family members to ask.
Well, this little undated anecdote of something by nameless people is full of questions, isn't it?

Was it terrorism? Was it a particularly elaborate suicide attempt by the councilman that went wrong? Had he been gunning for this woman for years, not because of race, but because of religion? Have the police ruled out UFOs?

You've missed the forest for the trees.
 

Joshism

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Well, this little undated anecdote of something by nameless people is full of questions, isn't it?

Was it terrorism? Was it a particularly elaborate suicide attempt by the councilman that went wrong? Had he been gunning for this woman for years, not because of race, but because of religion? Have the police ruled out UFOs?

You've missed the forest for the trees.
It's from 1940.

I was using it as an example of Jim Crow era incident involving a white man and the death of a black person where there's not sufficient evidence to determine whether it's an example of deliberate racial violence (or threat of violence), or just an accident.
 

Matt McKeon

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It's from 1940.

I was using it as an example of Jim Crow era incident involving a white man and the death of a black person where there's not sufficient evidence to determine whether it's an example of deliberate racial violence (or threat of violence), or just an accident.
Honestly, this seems like something not in the top ten things we have to ask ourselves about lynching. Not in the 100 top things either.
 

byron ed

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"When was lynching banned in the US?... it was prevented from coming to a vote in 1922, 1923, and 1924 in the U.S. Senate, due to filibusters by the Southern Democratic bloc" (wikepedia)

- just to demonstrate that it was more than "zero" that was attempted, that society generally was not blocking lynch legislation, that it was a disfunctional segment of society that was mostly responsible not only for lynching but for blocking further actions against it. Of course lynching was already illegal everywhere as murder, the problem has always been that it's been excused.

So the problem has been that. Not enough was done because short of vendetta society generally was blocked by Jim Crow white influence in Washington. Let's not exaggerate that "zero" was attempted, that no one of any importance spoke against it, that there were no African-Americans of importance that spoke against lynching, or that society generally shares equal blame with the Jim Crow south for lynching.
 

byron ed

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Periodical mob action by whites against blacks in the Jim Crow period is how that society functioned. Lynching was a feature not a bug.
In the Jim Crow south almost entirely. Why is there such a compunction here to seem to "defend" the legacy Confederacy by assuming equal blame for lynching to society generally?, i.e. the "mommy, Billy did it too" defense.

Not enough was done, and we do know why, and we know what disfunctional segment of society was by far more culpable for lynching and which blocked attempts to eliminate it.

That's not to excuse anybody else, just to calmly start with the history as it was.
 
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Jim Klag

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In the Jim Crow south almost entirely
According to the Tuskegee Institue, for the period from 1882-1968, there were 156 lynchings of African-Americans outside the former slaveholding states. Though a small percentage of the total number of lynchings, the number is not negligible. So, northerners and westerners were not blameless in the lynching epidemic. It is wrong to say that lynchings occurred "almost entirely" in the south.
 

Joshism

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Honestly, this seems like something not in the top ten things we have to ask ourselves about lynching. Not in the 100 top things either.
White on black lynching is clearly racial violence.

Lots of racial violence did not involve lynching.
 
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