I’m perhaps a little different here, in that I would disagree slightly these point of lynchings and the view of. First off, excellent article as usual.

My difference from my studies of the issues and evidence is that lynching was not simply frequent or a historical phenomenon. It was a systemically used system of political terror that was tacitly approved by the state and local authorities as an assertion of *their* system of white power. This system start after the Civil War, or rather during the end of the Civil War. I’m speaking of the statistics given here of actual lynchings by execution, which is a shown in those numbers excessive and abusive. I’m speaking of the “extrajudicial” murders—both the massacres and lynchings. Often it is hard to distinguish these two words in practice. For example, once a white posse hunted down a black American “alleged” to have raped a white woman. When they found him, he was with five other men, and so the white posse shot them all, all six. Is that a lynching or a massacre? The lynching in Marion, Indiana in the 1920s saw three lynchings of black Americans: one killed in the jail center who was supposedly guilt of I forget what, then two of his friends, for, well, being his friends. Of as we say in modern times, the “dangerous gang of thugs.” Constantly black men and women were killed in multiples, of two or more.
But the political technique to the supremacist was not one terror, to them is was exertion of protection of white power on a political level. It was a way not only to terrify black Americans in neoslavery South, a 15 fifteen state region where laws of segregation were explicitly passed and enacted by legislators, but a way that made them afraid to vote and to show them they could be punished by their unspoken white law. The unspoken part was important, as they were explicitly thumbing their nose or giving their finger to the federal government. They were sending the white union Yankees the message that the constitutional rights given to blacks in the 13-15th amendments did apply to them “down here.” “Keep your Yankee values out of our states!” Was the message. Thus we no white president ever send in troops to protect the polls to let blacks vote, nor send in any federal authority to investigate.
Murder is the most serious crime, and the one very explicitly given the right to the American government only under due rights process. The lynching law of each state was an establishment of white political one party of each state to show that only the state had a right to decide. That is, the federal government could not intervene in these states. This was not only some vague idea federally, but seen as the result of the. Compromise of 1877 when the Union withdrew their troops, leaving them and their political rights “unprotected” for the next 80 years plus. It’s no surprise what happened after that withdrawal of the Yankee troops from the South: the death rate of black American men and women skyrocketed as white men were “returned” to power —or to use the Southern technical term “Redeemed.”
Simultaneously, voting participation over the next two decades plummeted to near zero, even in the 55 counties were black Americans were 75 percent or more of the population, a clear political major. Black Americans in those counties were clearly usurped of their power with the federal withdrawn through a profound moral abandonment of the American principles of inalienable right (unalienable in the Declaration but the exact same definition, now the term is civil rights indicating they are somehow separate, that black Americans must fight for their basic rights that whites have by de facto practice and don’t have to fight for). The lynchings —I actually prefer genocidal killings or massacres to reflect the unspoken normalized political white man’s agreement in those states—was the expression to whites in the North, who read about them in the newspapers on a fairly regular basis: You can’t help these negroes Yankees, your complaints to your leaders won’t be heard.”
That is still the case today, as proven by the supremacists Tennessee politician quoted herein. He is deliberately saying someone horrific, genocidal, and embedded with a strong political history he and everyone in Tennessee’s legislature knows quite well. Somehow, his quote “slips” out, thus his message sent across the state and to the Yankees. He quickly issues an apology, says he was “joking” or “didn’t mean it that way”, though everyone knows exactly what the word lynching means, and then returns to his job unscathed but appreciated and accepted by his colleagues for showing the white untouchable power of the supermajority.
In fact, that white supermajority has never been broken, and neither has the “lynch law.” In 1905, a white Professor white a book with the name “Lynch Law”, inspired by work of Ida B. Wells and the anti lynching bill introduced by Congressmen White in 1900–the last black congressman who exited the building in January 1901 when the new term started. The book attempts to more scientifically do a genealogical study of lynching in America, from the origins of the phrase and the first lynchings to a study of data in all the states for “official” lynchings by execution and notes on unofficial ones. The conclusions that can be drawn are number ours by this northern white man disgusted by the practice but holding his moral judgement for the sake of data analysis, drawing charts and graphs. One such one is that it was not normal before the emancipation and end of the Civil War. Why? Because black American slaves were another white man’s property, and you don’t “destroy” another white man’s property, worth $15K-45K without permission. After the Civil War, the white posses int eh South were demonstrating that a “negro’s life” was no worthless and since nobody technically owned them, this is what happens to them “when they interfere in white justice.” Systems, like languages, die slowly, and only when assimilation occurs by a economically and politically strong power. In the South, that hasn’t happened yet.