Yes, you’re right. There’s a huge segment of white society that is conditioned to look on blacks as criminals and there’s another one that wants to frame blacks as criminals. The white Southerners wanted to make blacks appears as criminals for a good 90 years after the Civil War starting at the end of Reconstruction. The alleged horrible crimes against black men in particular and then went about in the most horrific, barbarous way of torture and murder possible that went just beyond even the depravity of the violence of Germany’s Holocaust (though Adolf still get an A for sheer volume of racial slaughter compared to the A+ of the White Southerners or simply whiters).
The whiters would alleged a crime, then without due process drag the innocent black man out to the wood or the town square, cut of an ear or fingers, then stab him, perhaps torch his flesh on fire, crackling his skin as they cheered “gleefully” while he agonized in pain, then hang him, sometimes still alive after burning, then kick townfolks who were watching would kick him on the way to the tree where he would be hung. Sometimes after hanging a group of whiters would take out their guns and shoot him as he hung, even if dead. Many times photos were taken from the early 1900s to the 1930s after Kodak’s mass produced camera appeared on the market starting in 1890. Then the body might be taken down and pulled apart, or have parts chopped off and bones or fingers might be auctioned off as mementos. Pictures afterwards would be developed and sold or made into postcards and sent through the mail.
This atrocious whiter lynching process is far worse than the shooting by a black man today while knocking off a convenient store or during a drug deal gone bad. That’s a single instance of bad split second decision, many times out of economic impoverishment and no support from the system of governments. This deliberately savage whiter lynching process is beyond criminal and outside the constitutional process. But on purpose.
So, what could be the message during that 80 years? I believe there was a political message to the white Northerners of the two party democracy from the single one party run South. Leontief mess with our supremacist system. The savage lynchings would appear in northern newspapers (see 100 years of Lynching to read many accounts or Ida B. Wells’ Southern Horrors —- both of which thoroughly shock this northern born white man for the depravity his race committed). These graphic accounts stuck int the minds of Northern politicians: if you send in your troops, more of your “precious” blacks who you abolitionists fought to free will die.” It was meant to cause deep dread and to keep the Union out of the “their” confederate South.
Who do I believe this was one of the reason for the absolute barbarity of these lynchings? Simple, they said so. The best quote (out of dozens and dozens from Southern politicians I’ve read where they proclaimed explicit racism) is from Senator Ben TIllman in 1909: “It was now after midnight, and the moon high in the heavens looked down peacefully on the deserted town and dead negroes, whose lives had been offered up as a sacrifice to the fanatical teachings and fiendish hate of those who sought to substitute the rule of the African for that of the Caucasian in South Carolina.” Notice that it is not just the dead blacks that he and his groups are talking about, but the reason for their killing: to teach “those” Northern Union whites who want to “substitute” the “rule” of the negro for that of the white. He portrays the black as “sacrifices” as their ultimate goal was to keep the white north out and let supremacists rule under their system. The 22 black Americans, the “rule of the African”, elected to Congress until 1898 had been eliminated as had the local and state negros elected up until 1900 in the South.
Thus there is a direct similarity between the “advertisement” of today’s crimes black men commit and the alleged crimes black men committed for 80 years who were lynched: to spread the word about the “lower” instincts of blacks, the “uncivilized” image of black men. White commit as much crime, but it is the black crimes that get shown the most and constantly. It is it justify the superiority of whites and make the white supremacists feel justified in their need to rule. At least that’s my two cents.
Sure, black Americans in black communities are just as worried about crime and also know the majority of blacks Americans don’t commit crimes. But the advertisement via the news is not for them. It’s for white supremacists and white politicians to continue to justify their racially actions beliefs.
