‘No One Saw a Thing’: When a Midwest Town Banded Together to Kill the Town Bully
thedailybeast.com
thedailybeast.com
I'm not persuaded, at least by this text. Another possible interpretation is that the legal system around Skidmore was completely unable to convict a repeat violent offender (McElroy), leading to a widespread (correct) belief that the legal system would not also provide any kind of useful restraint to future offenders. Indeed, that interpretation seems more likely to me.
That doesn't make the actions acceptable, of course. But it does put a spotlight on the importance of having a working legal system that provides some reasonable level of protection to the larger community.
This man was tried and convicted by a jury of his peers, it was just in a different courtroom.
I could imagine having witnessed the bully be a bully, not being a victim, and still deciding the bully needs to die. The decision can be made not based on the desire to defend yourself, and instead based on the desire to defend others / the desire to prevent unjust behavior.
Crimes are also more likely to be reported in poor metropolitan areas. Poor minorities are more like to stay in metropolitan areas. Resulting in a rather insidious bias that's hard to adjust for.
http://www.hngn.com/articles/75816/20150309/dea-was-told-not...
PS: It is also easier to hide a body in the country, so missing persons can hide many murders.
Is there evidence for this contact theory? It doesn’t match my understanding of crime patterns. For example there are many very dense cities around the world without much crime, and some sparsely populated rural areas with lots of crime.
A Google search turns up
http://science.time.com/2013/07/23/in-town-versus-country-it...
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/big-city-crime-murder-rates-a...
https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2013/01/are-big-citie...
https://kb.osu.edu/bitstream/handle/1811/86153/IJRC_Ward-eta...
There are huge numbers of trends in the crime data depending on you want to look at it, so I'm always open to changing my mind on topics like this, if there is good data to support it.
If there are literally 10 times fewer young people, it’s not too surprising that the rural counties had fewer crimes per capita. With that big a disparity it’s kind of shocking that the urban crime rate is only 50% higher.
I hadn’t realized that US rural counties have so few young people. It sounds like the population of those places is on the verge of collapse.
If the median age in rural counties is ~40, there are few small children, but only 2.5% of the people are 14–24, it sounds like there must be a pretty large number of 25–40 year olds though. Has there just been a sharp demographic break within the last generation with all of the young people suddenly moving away, or are large numbers of 30-somethings moving from the city to rural towns?
That collapse has been underway for a couple of generations now.
>Has there just been a sharp demographic break within the last generation with all of the young people suddenly moving away, or are large numbers of 30-somethings moving from the city to rural towns?
Depending on how you count, young people have been leaving farms for 4 or 5 generations now. Part of this is down to the increased efficiency of agriculture, which means fewer people are needed to produce food, which means fewer agricultural jobs. Most job creation happens in cities now, so young people who are not inheriting a family business tend to move toward cities. Richard Florida and others have written extensively about this demographic shift.
I know the output of these reports is difficult to interpret but see [1]. The top decile of per-capita violent deaths are rural counties, not urban ones.
1: https://wisqars.cdc.gov:8443/cdcMapFramework/output/m5886273...
https://crimeresearch.org/2017/04/number-murders-county-54-u...
_Anything_ measured in that way would show densely populated area vastly outnumbering rural areas, perhaps with the exclusion of things that essentially don't exist in cites, such as "number of farms per capita per square mile".
The measure appears to be concocted specifically for Lying With Statistics™.
That is, a dense urban area would have more face-to-face interactions than a sparse rural one. Given two areas with equal levels of per-capita violence, it would then follow that the more sparsely populated one would have more violence per face-to-face interaction, not less.
Murder-hectares per square capita? Murder-capitas per hectare? I'm not actually sure how the dimensional analysis works out.
I'm sure there are those, too, but IIRC in most violent crime the attacker and the victim know each other. Do people have substantially bigger social circles in cities?
Why per capita per square mile instead of per capita? Why do the miles enter into it? Because of more interactions? I'd like to see just the numbers per capita. I suspect they're fairly close.
Given 1 homicide in 100k for 100sq miles called "rural" vs 1 homicide in 100k for 5 sq miles called "urban", your odds of being in proximity of a homicide are much higher in the urban area. 20 times more likely.
This doesn't stand up. Crime statistics are measured after the crimes happen; whatever effect might be due to proximity has already taken place.
Consider: in your example you say two places have equal per-capita homicide rates but one is 20x denser. It follows that the denser area will have 20x more people "in proximity" to any given homicide, and therefore that P(victim|proximity) must be 20x lower compared to the rural place.
The way you've done the math only makes sense if everyone "in proximity" of a homicide was equally likely to be a victim, but given equal per-capita rates that can't be the case.
https://crimeresearch.org/2017/04/number-murders-county-54-u...
Try this:
Go find a crime map site, pick a big city and show homicides over the last year.
Then go to the racial dot map and see how it compares to the census of that locale.
I have a feeling if you did the same test but instead of “crime” you did “wealth percentile” you’d probably end up with the same results in the United States though unfortunately.
Not a lot of well off minority neighborhoods throughout the country and the wealth disparity even with all the poor white people is very real.
Believe it or not, this exact question has been studied pretty intensively for decades.
The predictive value of race is much higher than the predictive value of socioeconomic status.
His conclusion is that on a county-by-county level in the US, race is the strongest predictor of homicide rates, with rates of single-motherhood being next strongest. Poverty is a reasonable predictor, but weaker than these and several others.
I read this closely a couple years ago, but only skimmed it now to remind myself of the conclusions. I'd be interested to hear peoples' thoughts on whether his statistical techniques are appropriately applied. I recall it was was convincing to me at the time.
Now I have lost track of the exact scope of ‘socioeconomic status’, but i don’t think that being poor/uneducated/financially insecure explains it all either. West Virginia is the epitome of low socioeconomic status, but violent crime is relatively low.
My basic thinking is that these communities do not have a healthy, trusting relationship with law enforcement. The cause for that is complex of course, but the net effect ties back to the OP. If law enforcement isn’t a reliable or trusted resource, a community will fall back to vigilante/mob justice. Without the resources of a court and prison system to remove people from a community, that justice is going to come in the form of violence. This of course creates a negative feedback loop with law enforcement, exacerbating the problem.
On the upside, this problem might actually be easier to solve.
With that, you don’t need to centrally ‘decide’ anything. I think folks would generally observe patterns and come to similar conclusions. Honestly it’s probably the same way the ‘blue code’ develops...theres no meeting, just patterns. It’s not an absolute model, police do get called (and fired) all the time despite this.
Doesn’t really matter what i think at the end of the day and im grossly oversimplifying most of it, but it is a handy framework that explains a lot for me.
If you put a million people in a city and 100 of them die of a flu, everyone screams epidemic. You spread those same people out over all the small towns in a state, and 200 of them die, it's just fine.
Because, I suspect, we often associate statistics with a location rather than a cross section of society. We think "someone in my town was murdered", not "the murder rate is 1/250,000".
In addition, studies like this one (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1745-9125.1...) have found that the relationship between crime rates and undocumented immigrants actually decreases
As someone who came to America undocumented at the age of 5, my personal intuition is that undocumented people tend to be more fearful of authority and therefore more likely to avoid getting in trouble
1. They encouraged or at least bragged on beating folks down or killing them for respect and money. They emphasized the need for this. They did it to people in their own neighborhoods rather than other areas and groups like whites preferred.
2. Many of the gangs recruiting with such ideology had a rule where you couldn't leave. If oppression or lack of resources started it, the person who had a come up with still expected to commit the crimes backing up their group. We've seen this plenty with celebs in hip hop with Tupac gunned down over a rivalry.
3. Many of these areas discourage reading/literacy since it's a "white thing" vs oral traditions of black culture. The local gangs might even beat up kids for carrying books. In those areas, this further contributes to poor test scores and other things that hold people back.
The more apologetic sources don't bring this stuff up with three getting virtually no reporting. They want to shift all the blame toward white folks instead of assigning it appropriately. I keep bringing it up. It keeps coming back to me, too, with each hiring wave at my company with young blacks having one or more people that believe the same bullshit. Fortunately, they're far from a majority. Most aren't anything like them. They tell them they're idiots. Might drive them away more, though.
Of course, don't take my word for it. In Memphis, TN, they'll tell you if you ask:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxBIVnjlKos
https://wreg.com/2014/09/30/young-men-say-kroger-mob-attack-...
Although they mention cops as usual, they also emphasize how fun and profitable the drugs and violence are. Most of them get a kick out of it. It's power that's easy to have. Just have greater numbers than and some weapons for a target. Bam! Bang! Quick high they don't get solving bigger problems.
Also, the mindset works against most solutions people describe here which assume they even want a regular job. The locals tell me they're independent businessmen ("my own boss")who go for high gains despite the high risks, "just like stocks" one said. Some of the small-time dealers make $50,000 a year without a degree. They said they were on-call and on-guard at all times, though. Gotta work to make that money. Just not legal work cuz then they making nothing while other people make big money off their backs. Doesn't sound too far from the logic of founders set to be billionaires while their workers make average or less wages.
Might be hard for all us city slickers on HN to fathom, particularly when these sorts of country towns are frequently mocked or derided by people like us.
You bring up a good point, because that's another thing these country towns are known for—having a lot of respect for big cities and the people that live in them.
Fortunately not many people seem to feel this way, maybe because revenge doesn't work as a criminal defense.
People who have been wronged are usually highly emotional and it's hard for them to put themselves outside of their circumstances and view the incident objectively.
Justice is supposed to be blind for good reason. If we all carried out our own version of justice, I'm sure you'd eventually run into someone who thought being too loud at night should be punishable by death.
There are many instances where victims of bullying feel they have no recourse other than revenge. I don't know the answer for how to make that situation better, but I know it's not murder.
If your actions are causing others to suffer, and you're willingly doing nothing to prevent that, and you have expended the patience of those around you, then you get what's coming. Maybe he shouldn't have been such a shithead.
You are saying: "That was not the solution. But I don't know what the right solution is".
How can you possibly know that there is an alternative without knowing what it is?
I think what you are really saying is: "I have an ideological opposition to violence-as-a-tool which I cannot rationally explain". Or, "the consequences of violence-as-a-tool are so unthinkable that I choose to stop thinking."
Your line of thinking is responsible for the fact that this guy wasn't dealt with sooner. Maybe you should visit some of the victims of his behaviour before dismissing the seemingly-helpful vigilante justice in this situation.
The black-and-white line you're drawing between "blind justice" and "angry, vengeful townspeople" is not so clear in reality. Do we have AI algorithms for implementing first-principles justice? Are you so sure that first-principles justice doesn't include strategies which look like retaliation and revenge?
> "the consequences of violence-as-a-tool are so unthinkable that I choose to stop thinking."
And instead be something along the lines of.
Admitting exceptions where we allow violence-as-a-tool is more harmful than the harm prevented by violence here. Simply because the consequences of an exception set a precedent that lasts for a long time.
This does involve condemning people to their fate. Alternatively, you can take the position that sometimes people really should take an action they should simultaneously be condemned for.
If you apply this rule strictly, then the mobs could first hit the police. In many countries, police officers are violent and have a de facto impunity when they break the law.
In the US, the police kills more than 1000 citizens each year, especially black men and teenagers. They very rarely face jail, not even loosing their job.
In my country, France, over the past year several dozens of citizens have lost an eye because of police shooting, a few have lost a hand because of grenades. The justice system protects the policemen, even when the videos are explicit. And when a juge tries to do his work, he can't. A grandma was killed while closing her window because she received a grenade in her head. The commanding officer refused to let the juge expertise the grenade launchers of his squad. He was promoted soon after.
Most people that prone self-defense and rant about some bad guys' impunity do no wish to see this fact: most policemen can break the law and not face the consequences. They're the only category of citizens that are above the law.
In case anyone is curious to see a source, the Washington Post attempts to collect data regarding police shootings: https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/four-years-in-...
Advocates of our Second Amendment - the right to keep and bear arms - understand this. This idea was the primary reason for the Second Amendment's inclusion in the Bill of Rights.
In the words of Tench Coxe:
> Who are the militia? Are they not ourselves? Is it feared, then, that we shall turn our arms each man against his own bosom. Congress have no power to disarm the militia. Their swords, and every other terrible implement of the soldier, are the birthright of an American… The unlimited power of the sword is not in the hands of either the federal or state governments, but, where I trust in God it will ever remain, in the hands of the people.
In my opinion, minorities in particular have reason to arm themselves and to be prepared to defend themselves if necessary. Armed protest against civil government by blacks and others has a long history in the United States: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/black-panthers-california-196...
If you're interested in this sort of history, I'll recommend a couple of books: "Negroes with Guns", by Robert F. Williams; and "This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed", by Charles Cobb, Jr.
Robert F. Williams is a very interesting personality in and of himself. Among other things, he founded the Black Armed Guard - an NRA-sponsored rifle club dedicated to the defense the black community from racial violence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_F._Williams#Black_Armed...
That's an interesting take, since minorities commit - by very, very far - the greatest amount of violent crimes per capita in the USA.
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2016/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
For example, there is very little gun violence in the UK. But the amount of knife and fist violence might surprise you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firearms_regulation_in_the_Uni...
They have not always had the outright ban they have now.
Knife Crime:
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-42749089
With the number of fatal stabbings in England and Wales in 2017-18 the highest since records began - the BBC has tracked the first 100 killings in 2019 - revealing the people behind the headlines. - Mar 8, 2019
"there were 285 knife murders in England and Wales in 2017/18 — the highest number since the Second World War — and 34 in Scotland"
Not everything is black and white.
Thank you eit bringing this up. While recent events with shootings are unfortunate, what's more unfortunate is the media taking advantage of these events to push an agenda by claiming the 2nd amendment is only for hunting and they only interview people that dat the same, then go down the road of saying these guns aren't needed for hunting and should be made illegal.
Call me crazy, but I'd wager this is all done out of initiative and agenda and not out of ignorance. Reasons being to disarm the population of any meaningful ways to defend against government suppression.
For those thinking that our own army would never attack their own people, a good amount of our military is now contractors from other countries that are paid mercenaries.
In most other states, homicide is only justifiable under the higher threshold of being in immediate danger.
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/charlottes...
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/charlottes...
There are only two exotic elements I can find. First, Texas permits the use of deadly force to stop some non-violent criminals (e.g. burglars, robbers) from escaping with property. Second, it allows deadly force over theft and criminal mischief only at night.
That last clause is pretty bizarre, but none of it adds up to anything like "needed killin". Deadly force to recover property is somewhat unusual, but that wouldn't apply to the case in the article either.
It makes more sense if you consider it the other way around. Theft and criminal mischief are considered violent crimes for the purposes of self defense if they happen at night.
The line between theft and burglary is blurry and subjective when you're talking about situations where someone is stealing something from someone's property at night and said theft causes them to be woken up and respond. The law is basically saying that for the purposes of self defense theft can be considered burglary by default in those cases.
This makes it a little more morally justified than shooting someone who committed some real or perceived wrong, but isn't a current threat to others.
They stopped him because he was dangerous.
You have to remember this was 35+ years ago when this all happened. Things aren't what they used to be now. People didn't make long distance calls back then, because it was too expensive. You lived out it in the middle of nowhere especially back then, you're on your own. No one is coming to help you if you're in serious trouble. My parents had this joke. They said the fire department had a perfect record around where we were. They hadn't saved a house yet. Don't get me wrong, they really respected the firemen. The point was that when you live 20+ miles away from the fire station, there is no possible way they are going to save the house in time. There was no GPS, and 911 had only been invented a little over a decade before. A lot of people didn't even own phones.
It's easy to talk about the rule of law, and how they should let the justice system work it out, but it's a different kind of law in those parts. In a town that size, everyone knows everyone, and you're always talking to someone's brother, cousin, sister, etc. Oh you filed a report against someone?...yeah word gets around. The kind you don't want. Evidence gets "lost", etc. A lot of times it was (and still is in certain places) easier to just keep your mouth shut and move on. I'm not saying I agree with what they did, and I wasn't in their position, so I don't know what I'd do. I can sure see why they thought that was the only recourse they had though.
I asked “Wasn’t there a sheriff? Didn’t he get in trouble?” She said “no, there was no law”. I said “you mean like no law enforcement?” She said “no, there was no LAW”. Implying it was completely lawless way out there on the farm.
Crazy to think about. This was in the 1930’s.
There is a movie out to wrap up the story. I haven't seen it yet, but I have high hopes.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-12-03/a-dog-act-homicide-on...
As a consolation, in these kinds of cases, taking action and dealing with condemnation is still better than not taking action. Of course, it is not right that people have to choose between two wrongs (living with the situation, or taking action and being condemned for it).
But life isn't fair. That isn't a statement of 'pushing the world into a fair state is infeasible to the point of imposiblity'. Instead, it is a statement that 'there is no state of the world that could be described as fair.
Moreover, the effect of such 'unfair condemnation' is tempered by people like you. I suppose that an actual working society needs both voices. Certainly, the signaling effect does not require that the condemnation be universal, just that it is substantial.
The sentence started with perhaps. Hence, this was a supposition about how society should be.
Sure, if you feel threaten you should use your gun. But you're feeling being would have a significant cost for society and you should have to bear your part of it.
Humans normally have a strong aversion to murdering one another. Lots of soldiers in WWII simply would NOT fire their gun under any circumstances.
The fact that the situation got to the point where an entire town decided to murder a man speaks to a series of epic failures on a lot of fronts.
The key word here being other people. This is why I don't support 'nonviolent' politics; it basically encourages people to be punching bags in hopes of activating the conscience of people higher up the social scale...which is a lot better for the latter group than for the 'nonviolent demonstrators' getting brutalized. Turns out that people's consciences are pretty darn calloused these days, so if you're depending on on other people's empathy to solve your problems you're going to be waiting a long time.
Good ideals are worth suffering and risk of death. I'm honestly surprised you think otherwise. Not saying this is one of those cases necessarily, just responding to the general idea that principles should never be dogmatic.
0) http://mentalfloss.com/article/574749/ken-mcelroy-murder-ski...
A ruthless man named Edgar Watson, who had purportedly killed several people in Oklahoma and Florida, settled in the coastal Everglades of Florida (Chokoloksee area) around the turn of the last century and started a sugar cane plantation. He was known for the 'Watson payday' where, at the end of the harvest season, he would gather all of the drifters and ne'er-do-wells he had hired as fieldhands and gun them down. Additional bad behavior toward his neighbors lead to all of the town's men standing in line and gunning him down as he landed his boat on Chokoloskee Island one day.
I think broadly, I wonder what the place of vigilanteism like this should serve. The sentiments to protect the community against a man who isn't being recieved adequate justice- this in my opinion seems to echo the justification of other movements I'm aware of. There's often community discouse online on what to do with known bad actors when moderatorship isn't adequate for example.
Which is a far more common application of lynching. We should not be glorifying this.
In the historic case, that 'credible threat' was 'race mixing', uppity ______s, jews that were too well off for their own good, etc.
When you let the most violent members of a small town community unilaterally decide what is, and what is not a credible threat, that is exactly what you will get.
To be clear: I am not saying that their actions were right, just that its not fair to compare them to something like racially motivated lynching.
"Credible threat" has an actual meaning beyond just "whatever people think a 'credible threat' is".
The whole point of a lynch mob is that you get to throw out any objective standard of credible threat, and replace it with a subjective, heat-of-the-moment one, proposed by the thugs leading it, who know they will face no accountability for their actions.
That's what happens when you normalize lynching. Shitty people will happily use it as a weapon for injustice.
If you want to argue a slippery slope exists (and I think that may indeed be the case), blurring these very different motives together does not bolster your case. I mean, the town of Skidmore didn't go on to exact this kind of vigilante justice on anyone else, did it?
Perhaps, but the question was directed to you, not to them.
You're claiming that the only reason anyone would kill is if they feel a credible threat to their own life, but this simply isn't true. People kill for all sorts of other reasons. Lynch mobs were primarily driven by these other reasons, not primarily by reasons that boil down to self-defense.
To compound this issue, there does seem to be some parts of morality that are near universal, and can thus almost be established as objective. However, deciding that something is objectively morally right / wrong is generally overturned later on. Certainly, there are many examples of objective moral judgements that have turned out not to be universal.
In conclusion, we should not strive towards a set of rules for deciding whether something is moral. Instead, we should try to get closer to consensus on what is moral without expecting to ever even get close.
I think that "physically terrifying (as in, can dead lift a couple hundred pounds like it's nothing) guy who has been convicted of multiple crimes but the police are too afraid/incompetent/paid-off to actually keep him in jail" easily crosses the bar of "I'm not going to feel bad if vigilante justice takes its course".
No one's denying that terrible things have happened in the name of vigilante justice. But this is not the same thing. Justice spoke, but enforcement refused to do its job.
If the law isn't working, it will be abandoned.
Laws on race were imposed from a larger consensus on race (federally.) There's no such consensus on defending bullies who are terrorizing their neighbors. Specifics matter.
in both cases, it's an opportunity for the community to make a decision that falls somewhat outside the letter of the law. jury nullification has been used for both noble and quite ugly ends in the US.
The other, inner perspective is 'would you have participated in the killing, or at least be okay with refusing to testify against the killer?'
I think it might be okay for the judgement of the situation from the different perspectives to be inconsistent.
An episode that stuck in my head.
Wait, what did Trena do to also be a potential target here? Just guilt by association? Or was she actually actively participating in the criminal acts (and not being coerced to do so, as I imagine one might be before/while/after marrying a violent criminal at age 12)?
The article couldn't, you know, delve into this a bit more?
My guess is that Small doesn't like that she caused waves after the murder. As opposed to just going along with it.
> She became his accomplice, accompanying McElroy on several of his nocturnal visits to people he had targeted for harassment. As McElroy ranted, she would stand nearby, a firearm in her hands.
The whole situation raises some interesting parallels to wealthy & powerful malefactors routinely skating past legal consequences in our federal courts system.
> ...an incident that became so notorious they even made a TV movie about it (1991’s In Broad Daylight, starring Brian Dennehy, Cloris Leachman, Marcia Gay Harden and Chris Cooper)
[1] https://magazine.atavist.com/outlaw-country-klamath-county-o...
https://www.propublica.org/article/stebbins-alaska-cops-crim...
> In Stebbins alone, all seven of the police officers working as of July 1 have pleaded guilty to domestic violence charges within the past decade. Only one has received formal law enforcement training of any kind.
https://www.apnews.com/03b5999242a9414e856cdce36e9360aa
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/09/rape-cult...
https://www.ktva.com/story/37361490/alaska-deemed-most-dange...
OBVIOUSLY no one here is in a position to exonerate any of the specific crimes McElroy committed.
Sounds like a nice place to live, but if you were to be drawn there because of this they probably wouldn't want you living there. That is the attitude of people who feel resentful that 'doing what needs to be done' has drawn more national attention than the collected crimes of McElroy ever did.
The Midwest starts west of the the line between Fort Duquesne in Pittsburgh to the southwest corner of New York. It is north of the Ohio River, and east of the Mississippi River. St. Paul is Midwest. Minneapolis is Prairie.
St. Louis is "the Gateway to the West", not "the Gateway to More of the Midwest".
Then what's this "Upper Midwest" place I keep hearing about?[0] It definitely extends the Midwest past the Mississippi.
It's not our fault that true Midwestern culture is so rich and interesting that the folk of the Great Plains were compelled to emulate it. But to be fair, you are the second-best completely-distinct-and-separate cultural region in the US, so don't feel too bad about it.
~
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman
"The Midwest" is poorly-defined. Most polls conclude that Midwesterners believe that the Midwest is at least their state and neighboring states, and non-Midwesterners have basically no idea where it starts or ends.
The census region more or less covers the Northwest Territories plus that part of the Louisiana Purchase that became Missouri Territory. Largely settled by Germans and Scandinavians, and mostly free states (except Missouri itself).
I refer to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midwestern_United_States#Cultu... for further info on how the definition of "Midwest" differs depending on what part of the Midwest you're from.
https://www.quora.com/Did-slave-masters-actually-lynch-slave...
Also what makes these public killings so notable is the fact that it was a deliberate effort of an entire society to instill fear into a minority. That you don't see very often. There wasn't even an attempt at justice, they didn't even try to make it seem like these people weren't being killed just because of the color of their skin.
I prefer the version of history suggested by the last sentence, but unfortunately cannot accept it was accurate.
Looking around the world, I see it frequently and with broad geographic distribution. (Though it's not the whole society, just the dominant group, both in the immediate example and the general case across time and space.)
https://psmag.com/social-justice/the-shocking-legacy-of-amer...
EDIT: person I'm responding to makes the case that this case is SPECIAL in U.S. history and draws a direct line to racially motivated lynchings even though there's plenty of evidence that white-on-white lynchings occurred. I am not saying racially motivated lynchings didn't occur. I'm saying that history is not black and white.
A) many states had more white people lynched than blacks
B) The concentration of the south eastern states did make black people the victims more often both statistically and numerically, by a large margin but
C) White people being killed was not a statistical outlier. So there is no novelty.
D) “White” didn't include Italians, known Jewish people, any many others at the time. Not until the late 20th century, and pretty much still only so largely inclusive within North America.
E) Extrajudicial killing is a deep seated part of American history
https://www.naacp.org/history-of-lynchings/
So the conclusion is that neither of you are wrong but both are unproductive unsubstantial comments.
Not everyone’s family history is about a secret killing of a black person. Many’s only experience is mob justice against someone who was white.
Its not rare enough for race to be the focus of everyone’s bewilderment here.
This is a story about the Midwest and west where the targets were often not black. So turning it into a cohesion region with the entire north american continent is counterproductive when regions just have different history.
Were most lynchings? The numbers and history sure make it sound that way.
'rolltiide also has a point, that to take things as one giant pile of numbers masks regional variations. That and I don't know why people need to shoe-horn race relations into every article they can. It's not as if lynching is a long untold story, though maybe I'm slanted having spent time in the south where it is a well known facet of history.
Is it inaccurate for me to point out that the same study says some states had mostly white lynchings [that therefore may have had nothing to do with helping black people]
Is it inaccurate for me to say that it wasn't rare enough to consider it a novelty?
So you also think the original comment was “helplessly racist” lol?
One could have trivially found another way to bring up the history of lynching as relates to this instance of mob "justice."
This is more in line with currently existing high crime areas where nobody talks to the police as part of the culture. The demographics of this reality have no commonality with lynching statistics.
Its more closely related to anti snitching culture than us debating novelty of white people being lynched.
It is a total red herring to what this story even brings to the table.
Yes it did. But there were many incidences of such events AFTER the wild west era, and the victims were mostly black...
From https://www.naacp.org/history-of-lynchings/
> Out of the 4,743 people lynched only 1,297 white people were lynched.
Would not appear that being white and lynched are not necessarily unique, though perhaps for the time period.
I'm sure some were. Would be great if we had more information.
It is also worth pointing out you assume the man is guilty and deserving of death, but this is arbitrary lynching. Even our most heinous deserve their day in court. Innocent until proven guilty is more than a multiple choice test answer.
I'm sure that this kind of thing went on all the time in the US, in smaller towns and rural areas. People disappeared all the time. Probably most of them moved to the big city or California, but a bunch probably ended up in unmarked graves. A friend of mine had a grandmother who lived in Milwaukee. She was Jewish. She fell in love with the Polish butcher. They disappeared from Milwaukee. A couple of months later, they were in Denver, married, and she was now Catholic. The special thing about my friend's grandmother, is that he knows the story. The bitter thing about that story is that it can't happen today, because we all are tracked. There are good reasons, but that doesn't mean that giving up segmentation of risks is all that great.
“is that the man was both guilty and white” might have done the trick.
In fact, failure to integrate into a social order often increases your chances of passing on your genes.
1). Get good at talking to people, getting to know them. Making jokes and small talk. This requires practice but you can practice on anyone, talking to men and women is kind of the same skill.
2). Expand your social network. Join a book club. A lot of times the people you go on dates with will be friends of friends. This takes time and effort.
3). Take care of yourself. Get some exercise and take care of your skin. Get a flattering haircut.
All of these things are doable by anyone, especially if you’re young, they just take some time and effort, and a lot of time we nerdy men are too busy with projects and work to do them, that’s why we end up lonely. Not because women are all irrational or something. That’s just an excuse.
If anything my statement about prostitution was that women were profiting off of men's lizard brains.
> McElroy began stalking the Bowenkamp family, and eventually threatened Bo Bowenkamp in the back of his store with a shotgun in hand. In the ensuing confrontation, McElroy shot Bowenkamp in the neck; Bowenkamp survived, and McElroy was arrested and charged with attempted murder. McElroy was convicted at trial of assault, but freed on bail pending his appeal. Immediately after being released at a post-trial hearing, McElroy went to the D&G Tavern, a local bar, with an M1 Garand rifle with a bayonet attached, and made graphic threats about what he would do to Mr. Bowenkamp.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_McElroy
Does an innocent person look like this? You tell me.
I’m less conspiracy theory about this, and more just remarking (pointlessly, I suppose) how information deteriorates over time. Some may even be true, but used as a tool to build the rest around.
How can it be certain that the record isn't a post hoc fabrication. Or if not entirely, then at least embellished.
Nor feasible in this case. Even a town sheriff wouldn't be able to modify offline (1981) databases of multiple jurisdictions. Or have the endurance to manufacture plausible entries and histories for dozens and dozens of cases over decades.
A few hours research could likely pierce any misinformation.