‘Why 60 Minutes aired photos of lynchings’

[Dick Whitman]

My fellow whites who are surprised our (not-so-distant) relatives stood around in glee watching lynchings haven't been paying much attention to American history.

It's like the Ray Rice video. It's one thing to know it happens. It's another thing to see it.

 

[Jake_Taylor]

I wouldn't necessarily put myself in the surprised category, but it did dawn on me when I moved to Confederate states after college there was a different connotation when people talked about a lynching or gathering a posse.

Growing up in Kansas it was more of a Wild West thing, cattle thiefs and such, or a reference to Bleeding Kansas, with a lot of Abolitionists lynching white slavery supporters.

 

[doctorquant]

It's like the Ray Rice video. It's one thing to know it happens. It's another thing to see it.

True, but acknowledging that reality doesn't allow for much moral/intellectual superiority ...

 

[Alma]

My fellow whites who are surprised our (not-so-distant) relatives stood around in glee watching lynchings haven't been paying much attention to American history.

Shock doesn't presume naivete. Slavery and the virulent racism that came from it is America's original sin, but hideous acts of violence have been done the world over, many millions of times. I don't think anyone is surprised by much of anything anymore.

 

[Azrael]

Thread here from Nikole Hannah Jones.

 

[doctorquant]

That picture Horowitz linked to is the one in America to which I referred ...

 

[Smallpotatoes]

I wouldn't necessarily put myself in the surprised category, but it did dawn on me when I moved to Confederate states after college there was a different connotation when people talked about a lynching or gathering a posse.

Growing up in Kansas it was more of a Wild West thing, cattle thiefs and such, or a reference to Bleeding Kansas, with a lot of Abolitionists lynching white slavery supporters.

I once read a comment by some racist who said that blacks actually committed a lot of lynchings themselves. While I'm pretty sure that's not true, could he have been talking about this?

 

[Jake_Taylor]

I once read a comment by some racist who said that blacks actually committed a lot of lynchings themselves. While I'm pretty sure that's not true, could he have been talking about this?

No, if you look at that map on the first page the red areas in Kansas and Missouri are right along the border. That was pro-slavery whites vs. white abolitionists in the Bleeding Kansas Border War. The abolitionists strung up plenty of pro-slavery settlers trying to get Kansas voted into the Union as a slave state.

 

[Azrael]

From what I've read today, whites represented about a quarter of those lynched across the period under discussion.

Most of those probably conform to the suggestions above about border abolitionists; some more to the frontier justice model of the Wild West. Not sure how many were committed by African-Americans. I'd guess few, but as you'd imagine, the documentation is scant.

Of the others, the most notorious has to be Leo Frank in 1915.

 

[Smallpotatoes]

From what I've read today, whites represented about a quarter of those lynched across the period under discussion.

Most of those probably conform to the suggestions above about border abolitionists; some more to the frontier justice model of the Wild West. Not sure how many were committed by African-Americans. I'd guess few, but as you'd imagine, the documentation is scant.

Of the others, the most notorious has to be Leo Frank in 1915.

I seriously tend to doubt what that guy said about blacks committing lynchings.

 

[JC]

I seriously tend to doubt what that guy said about blacks committing lynchings.

Did you run that opinion through Snopes?

 

[doctorquant]

Did you run that opinion through Snopes?

His car dealer's F&I guy signed off on it.