Here’s the major problem I noticed after reading all the news article on Lynching, Lynches Law (1905), Ms. Wells, and the pictures (like without Sanctuary): the journalism is NOT reliable. Why? There are three groups of writers: black American newspapers; liberal and northern newspapers; and southern/pro-white newspapers. These are not three dimensional stories. The “southern” perspective is dismissive of the innocence and often dispatches the story quickly. The Liberal or Northern view minimizes the story and veracity of truth, sometimes not investigating the truth value of the “allegation” leveled against the black Americans killed. And the black American newspapers (like the Chicago Defender) are more detailed and “weighty” morally.
There is typically not much follow up on these public white organized murders about who did what do who and why there wasn’t an arrest at all. There were anti-lynching laws on the books starting the late 1800s meant to hold people accountable, including bystanders. In other words, an open air organized murder without the law present or afterwards. There is also a lot of “acceptance” on many accounts, where the crowd overwhelmed the small town sheriff, her relented and opened the jail door. If you’ve ever lived in a small southern town and studied them, then you will realize the sheriff is the most hardened, violent and unrepentant person in county and he knows all the white men. The idea the sheriff—going around in the 1870s to 1920 was arresting black American men (and some women) on flabby charges in order to rent them out as slaves under the 13th amendment to mining companies, pine tar labor camps, lumber or tree cutting labor camps, cotton plantations, sugar plantations—is some severely innocent naivety that makes that part of the narrative of the week sheriff simply rubbish.
The narratives are also vastly “flattened” before they were put in a spreadsheet, which only dehumanizes the stories more. Equivocating the “quality” and context of the lynchings is critical, and the evolution of these lynchings is missed entirely. The dramatic shift in reasoning for lynching from 1790 to 1834, to 1865, to 1890, then onward to the 1960s, and even today, misses completely the changes in reasoning, and the law behind it.
The idea of the “mob” is silly; these were organized planned murders of whites, later on with invitations and notices going out. Most times there was more than one person killed, or “lynched.” But worse the word “lynch” has come to mean a singular killing of a guilty black man done by rope. That again is minimizing the depravity. Many times black Americans were burned at the stake, then shot with bullets, then had their bodies cut up and passed out as souvenirs; or were stabbed, dragged through the streets by wire or rope, “de-sexed”, then maybe burned and hung, or shot. And never just simply shot: the bodies were deliberately pumped full of bullets, with groups of men emptying their guns with hundreds of rounds.
What’s been severely diminished is the depth of depravity in the bodily mutilations, and gruesome details. Why is that important? As a student of the Holocaust and having learned and lived in Germany as a student, I can tell you the Germans killed on a far bigger scale, but never with such zest for depravity of bodily mutilation. Also, the Germans never just let the town people do the murdering and desecrating. They hid their ethnic genocide; nearby townspeople kept quiet; and they never turned over the “right” to ethnically kill to all Germans, reserving that power for military commanders. The word is not “lynching” but “ethnic cleansing”, “American genocide”.
The narrative is already distorted, but the statistics come from white people, even though the Tuskegee institute collected the stories and records in an overwhelming brave act of scholarship, given their location. But most other substantial black narratives were eliminated, so again we face drastically reduced numbers. In Texas, over 500 black Americans were killed and trials held from 1865-66. On the federal record in the 1500 plus Senate report of 1880, a brave “amateur” black American ‘detective’ travelled through Louisiana by foot and submitted 96 pages of black Americans killed during the election season of 1878 alone. These were politically motivated killings of black Republican Americans. The Senator interviewing him in Minority report estimated that it was over 4,000 black American humans killed. That total is never reflected, because the source of collection is a black man, and not “trusted.” The white numbers shouldn’t be trusted, the “official” records, given the white men were often involved and intimidating any outside journalists that showed up, thus having every reason to lie or distort the truth and the numbers.
In 1895, ex-congressman Small, and black American, rose in the meeting in South Carolina and noted 53,000 black Americans had been killed from political repression since the end of the Civil War. Despite his serious dedication to truth and justice, an American war hero and one of the first elected black Americans and ex-slave who piloted a ship through Confederate lines with slaves hidden in, his testimony is dismissed, again reducing the overall rate of innocent black Americans murder by political violence. Yes, and the word political is erased, even though in the 1870s in places like South Carolina, Mississippi and Louisiana, the ethnic murders were politically motivated, with organized conservative MAGA Democrats setting out to deliberately wound, intimidate and kill black Republicans organizing at meetings to politically vote, often with some white “liberal” Republicans present.
A decade of politically motivated murder flattened into a word lynching and shoved in faceless spreadsheet disguises the troubling insurrectionist nature of the political violence. I’m not sure what the purpose of your project is, come to think of it? Because black American Republicans gathering politically and peacefully to vote were slaughter, like in the Colfax Massacre of 1873 (183 but probably much higher), or the Opelousas massacre in September 1868 also in Louisiana, don’t count as political murders, which they clearly were. That is because the insurrectionist nature was erased, leaving people with a wandering, purposeless “mob” just randomly killing black Americans. You should read the newspaper accounts and the public records to get at the truth and tell the story that isn’t told.
The black American Republicans repeatedly reported the political violence to the federal government Marshall in 1878, who collected all the stories and names from across the state. The Federal government under the new USDOJ sent in an investigator, who was tailed the whole time. The trial of 1879, a trial about the insurrectionist conservative MAGA Democrats would be effectively tried for overthrowing or tampering that election—by ballot box moving, murder, blocking the roads with guns, etc—against the black Republicans stands as a far bigger federal investigation and trial that Trump. To repeat, over 4,000 politically motivated murders of one party over another, on the public record, with one hundred and fifty eight witnesses, mostly heroic black Americans submitting testimony, was organized by the AG in the USDOJ. Then, at the last minute when the trial was set to start, it was voided through a process of “nolle processed.” That got minimized because “liberal” northern whites at the top wanted to minimize the political nature of it and not “upset” the majority of whites in the north, who might have their feelings hurt that the war was for nothing. After all, “only” black Americans were killed. Or as you say, lynched.
I believe you’re flattening an already flattened and dismissed narrative, doing a deep injustice to lives lost. If black lives should matter, then the real story must be told and investigated. The biggest insurrectionist trial cancelled and no one knows for the sake of “healing” the country. Not for saving democracy.