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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region Forums60 Minutes just had a riveting, haunting feature on lynchings
Last edited Sun Apr 8, 2018, 09:35 PM - Edit history (1)
Among other things, the piece highlighted how lynchings were used to prevent blacks from exercising their rights, particularly the right to vote, and for whites to remind blacks to "stay in their places." And, contrary to what some believe, lynchings were not limited to the Ku Klux Klan - most lynchings were carried out by ordinary, "respectable" white people.
This is yet another illustration of how racism and discrimination cannot be separated out from any policy for advancing economic equality. Lynching wasn't about economics - blacks of all economic statuses were lynched - but subjugation of a race, regardless of where they stood economically.
Another very striking aspect of this segment was the horrific photos of the lynchings, depicting grinning, happy, proud white people - often with their children by their sides - posing with the bodies of mutilated black men and women. It is jarring to observe, not only how acceptable these crimes were and how shamelessly the murderers and their accomplices displayed their filthy behavior, but how economically diverse the white mobs were. Judging by their dress, these mobs included poor, middle class and well-to-do whites who joined together to torture and murder "uppity" blacks.
I don't have a link to the video, but as soon as one goes up, I'll post it. In the meantime, I hope you'll try to take a look at it.
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Eliot Rosewater
(34,285 posts)Ignorant being lack of information
Sounds like this program has information in it people who are not POC need.
I know I will watch, even though I wrote 60 mins off a long time ago.
dhol82
(9,650 posts)Where did you get your information?
EffieBlack
(14,249 posts)A surprising number of white Americans are unfamiliar with this history.
dhol82
(9,650 posts)
Susan Calvin
(2,438 posts)Are unfamiliar with history, period.
Part of the problem.
radical noodle
(10,595 posts)just as they like to think of slaves as happy people who've been given free room & board. Many white folks have no interest in the crimes against minorities and especially those against African Americans.
Susan Calvin
(2,438 posts)In Texas, for example, I learned history, including the dirty parts and the progressive parts, in school.
I don't think that is currently the case.
Gothmog
(179,822 posts)Susan Calvin
(2,438 posts)
Equinox Moon
(6,344 posts)I am deeply moved. I feel more educated and informed about our American history. So important.
I want to see this awareness and memorials done for our Native Peoples as well.
superpatriotman
(6,870 posts)But my money doesn't go to AL so a visit is off my list. I will be there in spirit.
nolabear
(43,850 posts)Or the one in MS unless...or maybe the one in DC though maybe you don’t want to go there either.
Me? I haven’t been to all of them but the one in NC made me weep. People are trying.
Hortensis
(58,785 posts)I'm glad to have this brief glimpse, but I don't expect to ever visit. I don't like the way my nose clogs up and runs when I cry. I know of no one connected to us on either side to draw me there, and it wouldn't diminish the tragedy to the least degree.
As for not going to Alabama, look around you. I don't know where you live, but I'm 100% sure anyway that whatever you're imagining exists right where you are also. You do have people there.
spanone
(141,602 posts)Bringing their children along...Oprah did a great job.
misanthrope
(9,495 posts)I grew up in Alabama, born a few months after the 16th Street Baptist Church was bombed. All my life I've heard older Southerners excuse Jim Crow's domestic terrorism by discounting the Klan or lynchings, portraying it as the violence of a tiny number of people who were disliked by the majority of average citizens.
However, historical artifacts and tales of the era reveal it to something far worse. While everyone might not have been on horseback or taking an active part in the burning or lynching, they gave tacit approval by refusing to stand up to it.
More terribly, far too many of them used the occasions for family outings. They didn't tie the noose, but they had no problem making a picnic when the scene was discovered the next morning.
All these yahoos I still encounter who want to rhapsodize about small Southern towns, to conflate the imaginary TV hamlet of Mayberry as being indicative of reality are deluded. Those small towns spent decades enabling degradation, murder and terrorism as long as the victims bore a certain skin tone. The mythology of small Southern towns is a cousin to the Lost Cause.
malaise
(296,076 posts)Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II.
Institutional Racism was and still is practiced in America. That said we've come a long way and we still have a long way to go. The racists and fascists want to revert to their murderous past.
tblue37
(68,436 posts)malaise
(296,076 posts)the prison slavery
tblue37
(68,436 posts)A RIVETING, GROUNDBREAKING ACCOUNT OF HOW THE WAR ON CRIME HAS
TORN APART INNER-CITY COMMUNITIES
Forty years in, the tough on crime turn in American politics has spurred a prison boom of historic proportions that disproportionately affects Black communities. It has also torn at the lives of those on the outside. As arrest quotas and high tech surveillance criminalize entire blocks, a climate of fear and suspicion pervades daily life, not only for young men entangled in the legal system, but for their family members and working neighbors.
Alice Goffman spent six years in one Philadelphia neighborhood, documenting the routine stops, searches, raids, and beatings that young men navigate as they come of age. In the course of her research, she became roommates with Mike and Chuck, two friends trying to make ends meet between low wage jobs and the drug trade. Like many in the neighborhood, Mike and Chuck were caught up in a cycle of court cases, probation sentences, and low level warrants, with no clear way out. We observe their girlfriends and mothers enduring raids and interrogations, "clean" residents struggling to go to school and work every day as the cops chase down neighbors in the streets, and others eking out a living by providing clean urine, fake documents, and off the books medical care. This fugitive world is the hidden counterpoint to mass incarceration, the grim underside of our nation's social experiment in punishing Black men and their families. While recognizing the drug trade's damage, On The Run reveals a justice system gone awry: it is an exemplary work of scholarship highlighting the failures of the War on Crime, and a compassionate chronicle of the families caught in the midst of it.
EffieBlack
(14,249 posts)It’s an interesting look at how rampant segregation was in the North and how the NAACP used the courts to try to desegregate northern schools in the 1970s, something a lot of people don’t know, but it also provides great history lessons about the 20th century civil rights movement. And there’s a great chapter where the author, a federal judge himself, uses the law and facts to rip the bark off of Clarence Thomas and John Roberts.
Answering the Call is an extraordinary eyewitness account from an unsung hero of the battle for racial equality in America—a battle that, far from ending with the great victories of the civil rights era, saw some of its signal achievements in the desegregation fights of the 1970s and its most notable setbacks in the affirmative action debates that continue into the present in Ferguson, Baltimore, and beyond.
Judge Nathaniel R. Jones’s pathbreaking career was forged in the 1960s: as the first African American assistant U.S. attorney in Ohio; as assistant general counsel of the Kerner Commission; and, beginning in 1969, as general counsel of the NAACP. In that latter role, Jones coordinated attacks against Northern school segregation—a vital, divisive, and poorly understood chapter in the movement for equality—twice arguing in the pivotal U.S. Supreme Court case Bradley v. Milliken, which addressed school desegregation in Detroit. He also led the national response to the attacks against affirmative action, spearheading and arguing many of the signal legal cases of that effort.
Judge Jones's story is an essential corrective to the idea of a post-racial America—his voice and his testimony offering enduring evidence of the unfinished work of ending Jim Crow's legacy.
tblue37
(68,436 posts)misanthrope
(9,495 posts)I'm well familiar with the way it was used as a form of peonage and how the schism reinforced by Jim Crow help keep poor whites in line, too.
EffieBlack
(14,249 posts)And many moved up and out of those conditions, thanks to various footholds the country provided - such as the GI bill, VA loans, etc. - that were denied or limited to blacks.
misanthrope
(9,495 posts)The programs you mention didn't come along until after World War II. Before then, poverty in rural Alabama was mostly trans-generational. The Old South's feudal system and the culture it spawned didn't just disappear in the 1870s. Without some unforeseen and miraculously fortunate circumstance, you were going to remain in the same area, the same socio-economic class you'd always known.
WWII was a miracle for my family. My grandfather joined the armed forces then learned about radar and telecommunications on Uncle Sam's dime. He was able to buy the farm where my great-grandparents labored all their lives with no hope of relief. The skills he learned in the military allowed him to prosper in the private sector after retirement from the military.
My other grandparents benefited from WWII as well. They turned their war involvement into civil service careers that kept them in the middle class instead of the poor environment in which they grew up.
So, yeah, without the federal government coming to the rescue then they would have toiled away in the same places as their ancestors.
For African-Americans, they had to join the Great Migration to have close to the same opportunities.
EffieBlack
(14,249 posts)Blacks were frozen out of many of the programs that came out of the New Deal and WWII. These programs helped to create a middle class and allowed whites to build generational wealth but blacks were excluded from many of them, such as VA loans that enabled white veterans to buy houses with little or no money down. And while the GI bill paid for college, blacks couldn’t get into many colleges because they refused to admit them.
misanthrope
(9,495 posts)"The Warmth of Other Suns" by Isabel Wilkerson
https://www.amazon.com/Warmth-Other-Suns-Americas-Migration/dp/0679763880
EffieBlack
(14,249 posts)malaise
(296,076 posts)
Freddie
(10,104 posts)Really opened my eyes. Should be required reading in schools.
byronius
(7,973 posts)SHRED
(28,136 posts)And built on.
Genocide, slavery, and racism.
malaise
(296,076 posts)weapons trading since WW2
guillaumeb
(42,649 posts)Hortensis
(58,785 posts)Give us a break, and by that I mean look around.
Europe and China didn't import slaves, or not many, because they basically enslaved their own peoples and didn't need to. Just about everyone else did. American Indians, most tribes at least, practiced slavery.
And now that there are no uncontacted people on the planet, there are no groups free of racism.
Genocide? Come on. Our own founding fathers were very concerned about how to leave in Europe the "rivers of blood." Other primate species are also known to oractice whatever the word for genocide would be for them. This has been going on as long as we've existed, virtually everywhere.
EffieBlack
(14,249 posts)Hortensis
(58,785 posts)Slavery was practiced all over Africa also, Effie, and is today in some areas. You'll have read about the current plight of people escaping genocide only to feed new markets for slaves that have developed in response to pileups of migrants unable to continue to Europe.
My objection isn't to admitting our history in full and what it says about us, only to the implication that ours is especially bad. Actually, it's far better than most.
We can't pride ourselves too much on that, of course, and it in no way mitigates the suffering of those victimized. BUT, the timing of our formation as a nation benefited tremendously from the enormous advances in human decency that occurred before and during the Enlightenment.
In the centuries before then, many of what we've always considered dreadful atrocities in the new United States were considered in Europe to be normal and appropriate. As for the rest of the planet, it lagged and in many places still does, some places appallingly.
EffieBlack
(14,249 posts)We're not talking about world history and don't need to "put things in perspective" by invoking events that happened in other parts of the world in past centuries. We're talking about AMERICAN HISTORY.
America needs to own its shit. Period.
Nice try at diversion through whataboutism. But your eagerness to dilute and downplay America's shameful racial history is duly noted.
jaysunb
(11,856 posts)Hortensis
(58,785 posts)We can and should be, we need to understand ourselves. I was answering Shred's iteration of the common refrain of how awful America is.
If we don't know what is good about us, how will we protect and grow it? Would those in the habit of assuming our culture is depraved and wicked even try? Why would they?
As for your last message, you're over the line. You are ascribing thoughts and attitudes to me that are not correct and in a way that I don't deserve.
lunatica
(53,410 posts)is really a bad comparison. First of all it doesn’t absolve any country in any way. Slavery and genocide is never acceptable no matter how far back in history it goes.
We either take a stand and draw the line on what we want to be or we don’t. If we want to do that then the very first thing we have to do is admit our shadow side. And if we actually do that then and only then do we have a chance of becoming better.
Hortensis
(58,785 posts)us and our country. Whether we are addressing from the viewpoint of individual guilt, collective white guilt, or collective human guilt, it's beyond dreadful. Nothing will absolve it.
But people won't fight passionately to protect what's bad. That's why those trying to destroy what we have are trying so hard and so constantly to make us believe what America is is not worth fighting for, perhaps should fall so that someday it can rise again in another form.
Have a nice day.
EffieBlack
(14,249 posts)People who love this country will fight for it whether it’s good or bad. The difference is that people who TRULY love the country love it enough to fight to make it better.
African Americans have been crapped on, spit on, discriminated against, denigrated, robbed and more - but we didn’t walk away, we didn’t quit, we didn’t revolt, we didn’t tear down. We fought - and continue to fight - our asses off to move this country closer to its creed. If we didn’t love this country, flaws and all, as much as - and probably more than - other Americans, you’d know it because we probably would have taken it out by now.
So please spare the “If you mention the bad stuff, that means you’re trying to destroy it” false narrative.
tblue37
(68,436 posts)
FakeNoose
(41,622 posts)I thought she did an awesome job. And yes EffieBlack, I agree that it was haunting and even shocking for many of us.
a kennedy
(35,971 posts)from back in the day. This was a very informative piece and every American should see this memorial. I’m so ashamed to be a white American and know now that this happened in so many numbers. 
SunSeeker
(58,276 posts)
Ptah
(34,121 posts)sheshe2
(97,620 posts)Billy Holiday
Southern trees bear a strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.
Pastoral scene of the gallant south,
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh,
Then the sudden smell of burning flesh.
Here is fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter crop.
http://www.lyricsfreak.com/b/billie+holiday/strange+fruit_20017859.html
misanthrope
(9,495 posts)was a photo of a lynching in Indiana. While the song expressly names the South, the Hoosier State has its own ugly history with race, including electing an openly Klan governor in the 1920s.
A state doesn't have to be below the Mason-Dixon to emulate our nation's worst practices. Long before Nixon's Southern Strategy, the seep began.
EffieBlack
(14,249 posts)
Galraedia
(5,331 posts)He wasn't black. Also, it happened in 1882 and not 1920.
EffieBlack
(14,249 posts)I was trying to post a picture of a lynching depicted on 60 Minutes and got it wrong in my haste. Thanks - I’ll correct it!
BobTheSubgenius
(12,217 posts)...there are those that would bring that era back, if they could.
KrazyinKS
(291 posts)I do estate sales and you have to look at the postcards. She was putting them in a bag with one dollar on the whole thing. NO-you have to look at them. Real photo postcards RPPC are one of the few ways they documented this stuff I said like lynchings. Also dust storms and such. There were very few other ways these were documented. You have to look, boy was she MAD! No she said they are not worth anything, . Okay she did not want to look!
EffieBlack
(14,249 posts)Can you imagine?
ailsagirl
(24,287 posts)I'm on the west coast so I still can watch it this evening.
Crash2Parties
(6,017 posts)Black men get shot by police for carrying: a cell phone. A bag of food. Nothing. Keys. A wallet/ID, but mentioning as required that they are carrying a licensed, permitted gun. The officers involved typically get a paid vacation.
Meanwhile, white guys can open carry w/o incident. And commit multiple shootings and get carefully, gently apprehended & fed a burger & fries on the way to jail. Sometimes they'll even take over government land, buildings & destroy property with guns & still get acquitted.
If you are white & don't approve of how that makes you feel, *do* something about it. Tsk-tsking about lynchings a century ago doesn't count.
EffieBlack
(14,249 posts)the body, meant to warn and terrorize while demeaning and dehumanizing the victim
When Michael Brown was shot and killed in Ferguson, the police left his body lying in the street, uncovered for hours while they “processed the scene.” This has also happened in other police shootings where murdered black men are left lying in the street. No wonder many people feel that these are modern-day lynchings
It took me a long time to watch the video footage of the Laquan McDonald murder.
What is so jarring is how after he is first shot and is on the ground (and clearly not a threat to anyone), they continue to fire bullets into his prone body. Then a cop goes up and kicks the knife he has away... all the while he's lying there in the street.
Another CPD SUV pulls up. Cops get out. They glance at the body on the ground almost dismissively and go to chat with the other officers.
No one checks to see if he's alive, if he's breathing... they don't even view him as a human being. They'd have given a dog more dignity and consideration.
This police brutality... it is the new lynching because these cops are doing it out in public knowing there are dashcams and body cams and they STILL DON'T care. They know they have a system that is designed to give them cover and protection.
EffieBlack
(14,249 posts)misanthrope
(9,495 posts)"Meanwhile, white guys can open carry w/o incident. And commit multiple shootings and get carefully, gently apprehended & fed a burger & fries on the way to jail. Sometimes they'll even take over government land, buildings & destroy property with guns & still get acquitted."
And a trial by jury in Oregon, a state most of red America vilifies as one of the most liberal in the nation, let those men get away with it.
malaise
(296,076 posts):fistbunp:
Ilsa
(64,362 posts)I wouldn't let young children see the photographs. But the rest of us need to see and be abhorred by them.
mountain grammy
(29,034 posts)the EJI put out a few years ago.. it documents over 4000 lynchings over a period of about 75 years after the Civil War. It’s a tale of terror you won’t forget and it’s all true. No American child should graduate high school without studying the EJI report.
I’m sorry I missed this episode..I hope 60 Minutes gave the EJI the credit it deserves for this massive undertaking that is so important; documenting the brutal deaths of thousands of innocent citizens and the reason every statue to white supremacy must come down immediately.
EffieBlack
(14,249 posts)guillaumeb
(42,649 posts)lunatica
(53,410 posts)Lynchings were to instill terror. Nothing else. It’s not like any Blacks were a threat on any level. Whites were not in fear of their lives or of losing their land or businesses. Whites weren’t defending themselves or their way of life and they weren’t threatened on any level.
It was terrorism for no reason whatsoever. None.
guillaumeb
(42,649 posts)But the word "terrorism" seems to be reserved for non-white and non US Government actors.
lunatica
(53,410 posts)That shit has to change if we’re ever going to be a better country. Jamming our heads in the sand sure isn’t going to do it!
Ferrets are Cool
(22,956 posts)to POC. I'm old enough to have my grandfater tell me things that makes me sick to my stomach. Not anything that he was involved with personally, but knew people who had done horrible things.
It seems the lynchings were done, as you stated, to "keep them in their place".
EffieBlack
(14,249 posts)But in using them, they revealed their own depravity.
tonyt53
(5,737 posts)Yeah, it was a black man being hanged.
TreasonousBastard
(43,049 posts)
Reports of over 20,000 showing up for his hanging were probably overblown, but a hell of a lot did, as you can see from the picture.
I knew a guy who said his father was there, and when the crowd ripped up Bethea's clothes, he got a piece of the shirt.
http://allthingscrimeblog.com/2014/01/14/the-last-public-hanging-in-the-united-states-dateline-kentucky-1936-2/
Note that the penalty for murder was electrocution at a state prison, while for rape it was hanging-- they charged Bethea with rape just so they could hang him locally.
SunSeeker
(58,276 posts)Tatiana
(14,167 posts)I'm glad 60 minutes provided a spotlight on this horrific practice.
DallasNE
(8,007 posts)The all white law enforcement agencies did not open criminal investigations making murder of blacks effectively legal.
Liberty Belle
(9,707 posts)Even though he feared retaliation by the Klan for saying no (these were prominent people in the town), he told them that any group where a man has to cover his face because of what they're doing, isn't a group he would ever join.
He worried they would come back and burn his farm down, which he later lost in the Depression. But he did the right thing anyhow.
So I have no tolerance for people who use poverty or lack of education as excuses for racism and joining white supremacist groups. Grandpa only had a 6th grade education. He was born in a barn, when his parents came by covered wagon from Tennessee and built a barn before a house. He walked the whole way. He was surrounded by bigots, yet somehow rose above that.
He was only about 5 feet six inches tall, but he was a giant when it came to integrity.
How do we instill those values in young people today, and break this cycle of hate?
antifash
(18 posts)
no_hypocrisy
(54,899 posts)with children invited, food brought, and a celebration. The excitement was nauseating.
Although only two men were indicted and later convicted, my guess is that Emmett Till was the last "famous" lynching in the South. (When I taught this historical event to a group of 8th graders in the inner-city, I rhetorically asked how much hate does a man have to keep destroying a corpse until it was not recognized as a human. In a different place & time, any of those students could have been Emmett Till.)
EffieBlack
(14,249 posts)Emmitt Till’s murder - precipitated by a white woman falsely accusing the 14-year-old of whistling at her - highlights another very sensitive area: the complicity of many white women in the subjugation, brutality and murder of blacks, particularly black men.
This history is one of the reasons, I believe, that many African-Americans get very frustrated by such things as watching 52% of white women vote for Donald Trump and then being criticized when we question their motives. We have a long history in this country of white women (not all, certainly, but a critical mass), when push comes to shove, lining up with white men against the interests of blacks and other minorities, often with tragic consequences. But when we point itout, we’re attacked for being unfair to them or, of course “being divisive.”
pansypoo53219
(23,034 posts)
IronLionZion
(51,267 posts)he replied before 1965.
Think about that for a bit. And think of the people who voted to take us backwards to a time when things were great for some but sucked for many.
EffieBlack
(14,249 posts)I’m sure he and his acolytes think things have been going downhill from there.
IronLionZion
(51,267 posts)my grandparents immigrated the very next year.
Eliot Rosewater
(34,285 posts)you are black.
Period.
Now, how many parties do we have? two? So if you dont hate black people, you do what? Vote for ANY democrat?
got it
Ninga
(9,012 posts)that sprouted up....postcards of lynchings was a huge business.
The struggle is real...today more than ever.
marieo1
(1,402 posts)I watched this documentary and it was disgusting!! How some people think they are chosen and have more rights than others is beyond me. Thanks to 60 minutes for airing the atrocities.
heaven05
(18,124 posts)
Reader Rabbit
(2,758 posts)It's part of the history of our country, and it should be taught in all schools.
EffieBlack
(14,249 posts)byronius
(7,973 posts)I read 'Gotham' a few years ago, the amazing history of NYC - there's a particularly disturbing description from the early 1700's of a black slave named Ceasar who attempted to escape from his violent master. He was captured and burned to death on a rotating spit over a period of ten days.
Children played with rag dolls next to the fire while he screamed. It was considered a minor holiday.
I'm willing to bet that most of the people who participated in this kind of barbarism considered themselves to be good Christians.
Just like today.
lunatica
(53,410 posts)People laughing it up in the photographs.
Some of the younger people in the shots are still alive today
Gothmog
(179,822 posts)Gothmog
(179,822 posts)A good example of a fairly recent lynching in Texas is James Byrd, JR. https://newsone.com/2019388/james-byrd-jr-murdered/
The men were quickly arrested, with Jasper finding itself uncomfortably under the glare of scrutiny and shocked stares. Police charged the trio with capital murder, as each of the men was tried in separate cases. King, considered the ringleader, and Brewer were part of a White supremacy group; they reportedly met in prison when they joined the gang years prior.
Both men were sentenced to death row with Brewer being killed by lethal injection last September. On the eve of his death, Brewer said he felt no remorse and would do it all over again. King currently sits on Texas’ death row list, while Berry, who is serving life in prison, was spared capital punishment after prosecutors determined by some manner of miracle that he was not a racist.
Tom Rinaldo
(23,187 posts)It should be recalled with revulsion by every generation born for as long as our species survives. Acts like lynching, the distribution of smallpox blankets, and the Nazi Death Camps can never be hidden from the light of day less they fester once again in the dark.