Lynching
Our contemporary sense of lynching is somewhat different from what the word conveyed back in the day. We tend to think of, for instance, a black man whistling at a white woman on the street of a southern town and a mob grabbing the man there, or from his home later, and hanging him. That kind of KKK-style lynching is a significant part of our history, of course. Intimidating street vigilantism.
But if you asked someone during the lynching mania of about 1910s-1930s to describe a lynching, the archetypal lynching involved a mob fighting the police to capture and murder an accused criminal in legal custody. It was vigilantism on a grand scale... half a town rising up against its own civil institutions.
Lynching was common with black suspects in cases with white victims. It was a racially disproportinate crime, though it was not racially exclusive. Given the relative size of the white population, the average lynching victim was white. And lynching was not limited to the south. It thrived in most of "real America."
It was two things. 1) Hatred of minorities, foreigners, hobos and other outsiders. 2) Hatred of our entire system of civil peace-keeping and law enforcement and justice as not reflecting the will of the people.
A heinous crime is committed. The police pick somebody up to charge or question. The word goes out on the street that the police "have the guy who did it." A mob forms and goes to surround the police station demanding that the accused be given to the mob for summary execution.
The mob sometimes threatened to kill the police... to burn down the station... thse were not subtle conflicts!
Sometimes the police would be scared enough to turn the man over to the mob. Sometimes the police bugged out the back door, leaving the jail undefended. Sometimes the police fought long and hard. Police were often injured and sometimes killed.
The lynching fad was so big in the 1920s that when a high profile suspect was brought in the police would take defensive measures in advance, laying in supplies of food, putting gunmen on the roof and barricading doors... preparing for likely violent conflict with the citizenry.
Why did people think the people warring on the police and courts was acceptable? Partially because some politicians supported it.
One of the most infamous lynchings was in an agricultural California town in the 1930s. The mob laid siege to the jail, mortally endangered and injured police, got the kidnapping suspects, hung them, burned their genitals with cigarettes (post-mortem) and hacked off flesh for souvenirs. Real medieval stuff.
And the governor of California said the mob deserved medals for their actions! (Think how the police and their families felt.)
There is always a primitive pro-vigilante constituency and they vote.
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Essentially, as Oklahoma became more a stable environment it stopped lynching whites. ("While the numbers actually declined, the victims were almost exclusively black"
So there is probably an emelement of "frontier justice" fading along with the frontier, but the new civil protections of a more settled society not being extended to blacks.
This was part of the broader retreat of civilization from the south circa 1890-1950 as the Union threw in the towel. (Blacks could usually vote and hold office and own property in the south in 1870 but not in 1920.)
I agree with you 1005 about the effect of government endorsement of racism. It fosters vigilantism. It makes the rscist feel like he is in tune with genral government goals.
There was anaver a law in California saying that schoolboys were allowed to throw rocks at Chinese immigrants. But there were laws saying they couldn't own land... and schoolboys threw rocks at them. Why not? They were officially hated and officially inhuman.
