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Originally Posted by pdurrant
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You mean the page that lists lynchings for 1890 onward? I'm pretty sure that lynchings didn't start in 1890 in the US.
https://daily.jstor.org/the-untold-h...american-west/
One of the quotes it the article is of particular note -
"The “primacy of racial prejudice” as motivation for lynching was underlined by the ritualized torture of victims, who were shot, burned, and mutilated before and after hanging. Anglos were also victims of lynch mobs, of course, but without the ceremony and public spectacle."
Which is somewhat my point. An example is the case of William Longley.
https://spartacus-educational.com/WWlongley.htm
Longley was famous for being hanged twice. He was lynched as a horse thief, but as the vigilantes were riding out, one turned at shot at Longley. By chance, the shot hit the rope, weakening the rope enough that it broke, leaving Longley still alive. In 1875, Longley killed Wilson Anderson. He was captured, convicted and executed in 1878. The ironic part of this was that Longley was a racist, member of the KKK and was said to have killed 32 men, mostly black. Of course, like most western legends, little of it is documented.
Many say that Longley's lynching was a legend as was him killing 32 men. There is no way to prove it one way or the other. Many times the old legends of the west have to be taken with a grain of salt and it's left to the reader to decide what they want to believe and not.
What is certainly true is that vigilantes justice was quite common in the old west. It was, however, rarely documented other than being mentioned in passing by someone in a letter, or maybe a brief mention in one of the local papers.
Hum, well maybe my knowledge of history isn't actually derived from movies, but of my interest in history. I did minor in history after all.
No doubt that there was a upsurge of racially motivated lynchings from 1890 up through the 1930's and even beyond. It was a big problem and a national scandal during the early 1900's and was one of the reasons that Teddy Roosevelt became the first president to officially invite a black to dinner at the White House.
But the laser focus on black lynchings in the South during what was mostly a 60 year time period (as was documented in a recent report, lynchings were actually pretty wide spread in the US at that time as this interactive map shows -
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart...tes-180961877/) is very much a distortion of the history of lynchings in the US.