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To be clear, community murders like this happened all the time in US history. The thing that makes this special is that the man killed was white and actually gu
by neaden 7y ago
To be clear, community murders like this happened all the time in US history. The thing that makes this special is that the man killed was white and actually guilty of crimes.
- Frondo 7y agoThe parent poster is referring to race-motivated lynchings, of which there have been thousands over the decades.[1] [1] https://www.naacp.org/history-of-lynchings/ https://www.naacp.org/history-of-lynchings/
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- braythwayt 7y ago100% true. This is the history of lynching in America. Community murders where nobody saw a thing, and the justification was always that the murdered person was a degenerate who would not receive what the town thinks would be adequate punishment under the law.
- vinceguidry 7y agoGreat reading on the culture that gave rise to lynching: https://www.quora.com/Did-slave-masters-actually-lynch-slaves-themselves-or-did-they-have-authorities-do-it/answer/Erik-Painter https://www.quora.com/Did-slave-masters-actually-lynch-slave...
- bluishgreen 7y agoThat was a brutal read.
- chrisco255 7y agoGrotesque but the fact is that these public square hangings were done since medieval times and probably earlier. From the Salem witch trials to the San Francisco vigilantes, it happened in many town squares, and it was believed to be justified: https://www.legendsofamerica.com/ah-lynching/2/ https://www.legendsofamerica.com/ah-lynching/2/
- vinceguidry 7y agoThese weren't all that long ago. Someone claimed that there are people walking around today that went to one of these events. I couldn't corroborate that claim but we're talking less than a hundred years ago. While the Middle ages were some 5-900 years ago. Also what makes these public killings so notable is the fact that it was a deliberate effort of an entire society to instill fear into a minority. That you don't see very often. There wasn't even an attempt at justice, they didn't even try to make it seem like these people weren't being killed just because of the color of their skin.
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- chrisco255 7y agoNo, they were always accused of rape, murder or something substantial. Read the article I posted above. I suspect that in some cases, they were correct in their accusations. That being said, I don't believe in the death penalty for a lot of reasons, not least of which is this tendency of humans to seek "justice" with often little evidence at all.
- dragonwriter 7y ago> Also what makes these public killings so notable is the fact that it was a deliberate effort of an entire society to instill fear into a minority. That you don't see very often. I prefer the version of history suggested by the last sentence, but unfortunately cannot accept it was accurate. Looking around the world, I see it frequently and with broad geographic distribution. (Though it's not the whole society, just the dominant group, both in the immediate example and the general case across time and space.)
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- viburnum 7y agoLynchings frequently happened because white people wanted to steal land from black or native people.
- cmurf 7y agoYep. Although you don't have to go back too far for the latest lynching and subsequent revisionism. https://psmag.com/social-justice/the-shocking-legacy-of-americas-worst-modern-day-lynching https://psmag.com/social-justice/the-shocking-legacy-of-amer...
- chrisco255 7y agoYou were half right until you dug into the helplessly racist narrative. The wild west had many incidences of such events and the victims were often white. One need only look at the story of Billy the Kid and the regulators or Wyatt Earp's arc for evidence. The only thing that makes this unusual is it was in 1981. EDIT: person I'm responding to makes the case that this case is SPECIAL in U.S. history and draws a direct line to racially motivated lynchings even though there's plenty of evidence that white-on-white lynchings occurred. I am not saying racially motivated lynchings didn't occur. I'm saying that history is not black and white.
- coldtea 7y ago>The wild west had many incidences of such events and the victims were often white Yes it did. But there were many incidences of such events AFTER the wild west era, and the victims were mostly black...
- widowlark 7y agohelplessly racist? Thousands of lynchings occurred like this across the country for a hundred years - you can bet they weren't lynching whites more often.
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- rolltiide 7y agoAccording to the NAACP A) many states had more white people lynched than blacks B) The concentration of the south eastern states did make black people the victims more often both statistically and numerically, by a large margin but C) White people being killed was not a statistical outlier. So there is no novelty. D) “White” didn't include Italians, known Jewish people, any many others at the time. Not until the late 20th century, and pretty much still only so largely inclusive within North America. E) Extrajudicial killing is a deep seated part of American history https://www.naacp.org/history-of-lynchings/ https://www.naacp.org/history-of-lynchings/ So the conclusion is that neither of you are wrong but both are unproductive unsubstantial comments. Not everyone’s family history is about a secret killing of a black person. Many’s only experience is mob justice against someone who was white. Its not rare enough for race to be the focus of everyone’s bewilderment here. This is a story about the Midwest and west where the targets were often not black. So turning it into a cohesion region with the entire north american continent is counterproductive when regions just have different history.
- mieseratte 7y ago> The thing that makes this special is that the man killed was white From https://www.naacp.org/history-of-lynchings/ https://www.naacp.org/history-of-lynchings/ > Out of the 4,743 people lynched only 1,297 white people were lynched. Would not appear that being white and lynched are not necessarily unique, though perhaps for the time period.
- pazimzadeh 7y agoMany of those whites were probably black-sympathizers who would have been called n*-lovers or "black on the inside."
- faissaloo 7y agoAlso 'coalburners' for the women who married/slept with black men
- n1ght 7y agoYou must know a thing or two about that, how bizarrely off topic.
- mieseratte 7y ago> Many of those whites were probably black-sympathizers I'm sure some were. Would be great if we had more information.
- neaden 7y agothe rest of my sentence was important too, I don't really appreciate you cutting it off to pretend I said something I didn't.
- liability 7y agoSurely you don't really believe that of the 1,297 white people lynched, all were innocent. His point remains then, there is no shortage of guilty white men getting lynched in American history. Lots of white murderers and rapists got lynched, sometimes after they were convicted in court, by mobs who were impatient or particularly enraged.
- bediger4000 7y agoThe thing that makes this different is that the US government has kept better track of its citizens since about 1955. Despite our fear of the Mark of The Beast, we track (effectively) everybody via Social Security Number. I don't think this was true until on into the 1970s. I'm sure that this kind of thing went on all the time in the US, in smaller towns and rural areas. People disappeared all the time. Probably most of them moved to the big city or California, but a bunch probably ended up in unmarked graves. A friend of mine had a grandmother who lived in Milwaukee. She was Jewish. She fell in love with the Polish butcher. They disappeared from Milwaukee. A couple of months later, they were in Denver, married, and she was now Catholic. The special thing about my friend's grandmother, is that he knows the story. The bitter thing about that story is that it can't happen today, because we all are tracked. There are good reasons, but that doesn't mean that giving up segmentation of risks is all that great.
- macintux 7y agoClearly the “and” was not strong enough, based on the negative comments. “is that the man was both guilty and white” might have done the trick.