Map of 73 Years of Lynchings | Hacker News Reader

Map of 73 Years of Lynchings

nytimes.com

70 pointseastbayjake28 comments

Related: Without Sanctuary (NSFW)

"Searching through America's past for the last 25 years, collector James Allen uncovered an extraordinary visual legacy: photographs and postcards taken as souvenirs at lynchings throughout America."

"Without Sanctuary is a photo document of proof, an uncartiring of crimes, of collective mass murder, of mass memory graves excavated from the American conscience. Part postal cards, common as dirt, souvenirs skin-thin and fresh-tatooed proud, the trade cards of those assisting at ritual racial killings and others acts of mad citizenry. The communities' best citizens lurking just outside the frame. Destined to decay, these few survivors of an original photo population of many thousands, turn the living to pillars of salt", said James Allen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGrXCOIx6QQ [5m]

http://withoutsanctuary.org/main.html

That website has broken CSS - presumably it's from the IE6 era or before (it seems to be optimised for 800x600 or lower resolutions too).

I hope it gets fixed at some point, because it is a subject that deserves more attention.

We shouldn't limit ourselves to just the South. Lynching was prevalent nationwide. Though the vast majority of lynchings happened in the South, it is worth noting that the practice "spilled over" into other areas of the country. Unfortunately, any American in the early twentieth century could have partaken.

http://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/64pct8rc9780252...

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_vault/2013/01/08/lynching_map...

17 of the states on the slate chart have 0 or 1 lynching listed (I think 1 incident does not indicate prevalence).

The mob violence outside the south was also less racially directed:

https://books.google.com/books?id=CR0TMCIfE14C&lpg=PA154&ots...

do note they purposefully excluded any death where they could not find three perpetrators. Really curious why two on one is not included, that would seem a more likely occurrence.

I think it just comes down to trying somehow to separate it from murder. Tacit acceptance of murders isn't a whole lot better than mob violence, but it is interesting to try to examine them separately.

The accounts of some lynchings are simply barbaric, large crowds dismembering and beating the victims, then burning them, all of it sort of in a picnic atmosphere. Even announcements of the coming lynching in the newspaper. That's a really different thing than 2 people conspiring to hang someone (and still really different than 3 people doing it, but I guess a clear line simplifies the compilation).

I think their methodology didn't count the infamous Emmett Till lynching, which was two white men acting alone (but sanctioned by 12 white jurors refusing to convict them): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmett_Till

Page 87 of this dissertation indicates that they did classify Emmett Till's murder as a lynching:

http://www.africanafrican.com/folder12/african%20african%20a...

The text supported by citation 22.

(I've been poking around for a copy of the Tuskegee Institute 1959 report and had seen that before I read your comment, I'm not angrily trying to refute you or anything like that. Finding a copy of 100 Years of Lynching looks like the easiest way to see the report.)

I know the Tuskegee Institute (as well as the NAACP) classified Till's murder as a lynching, but the Equal Justice Initiative's methodology required that three or more people participate in the lynching, which would disqualify Till from being counted in their report.

The slate articles says:

In 1959, Tuskegee defined its parameters for pronouncing a murder a “lynching”: “There must be legal evidence that a person was killed. That person must have met death illegally. A group of three or more persons must have participated in the killing. The group must have acted under the pretext of service to justice, race or tradition.”

So I was thinking from there.

It seems lynching density goes beyond mere population density, especially along the Mississippi river valley: http://mcdc-maps.missouri.edu/totalpop1790-2010/images/1920....

This seems like an opportunity for predictive analytics to figure out which areas are most prone to lynchings and some intervention methods to prevent them.

Yes, there was a lot of energy put into stopping this sort of thing in the US in the 1960s. That's why it stopped.

(Wikipedia seems to have good coverage of it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African-American_Civil_Rights_M... )

I've probably overstated the role of the civil rights movement there. Certainly, part of the outcome of the civil rights movement was a national expression of the unacceptability of racially motivated mob violence, but things like state police forces and the national guard (both were more willing to resist mobs than local police had been) and changing attitudes in the south had contributed to starting the decline.

Holy hell, I had no idea lynchings were so common (non-US cititizen). 600 lynchings a year, that's pretty crazy. EDIT: Oh it's over a five year period. (Not to imply that makes it better).

Yeah, they are also executing children.

every country has their dark times, most grow out of it. Some unfortunately don't or worse lapse back into them.

Or change targets.

Whenever I read about how black people were terrorised in the Southern US, the tactics used remind me of how the Spartans treated the Helots.

Phillips County, Ark., home of Marvell Academy. Founded as a segregationist school in 1966 and still 100% white - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvell_Academy http://marvellacademy.org/

Lynching doesn't mean killing.

http://rarehistoricalphotos.com/french-female-collaborator-p...

and I think it's not a play on current excepted English, I think it's an important distinction.

I learned this while living in Brazil where 'linchar' is a verb, and used in both senses. Here's Etymonline's definition: "originally any sort of summary justice, especially by flogging; narrowing of focus to "extralegal execution by hanging" is 20c."

This American Life has an episode ("Tarred and Feathered") on the subject of summary justice. http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/522/t...

> Lynching doesn't mean killing.

In USA, in the south when it was negroes who were lynched it meant exactly that. KILLING negroes.

It wasn't just negroes, but also suspected supporters, and it was almost always by hanging.

Hanging was used some of the times, but something that was almost always present was parading the soon to be lynched through the black parts of town (including schools) as an object lesson as well as torture. Torture was almost always involved (for example, in the case of a black woman pregnant lynched, having her child cut out of her stomach beforehand while she was still alive and having the childs head smashed). The torture served the purpose of keeping the black population in a constant state of terror, afraid of even attempting to assert their rights (this also explains the killings during the Civil Rights Era)

The lynching of Jesse Washington in Waco Texas had all the elements (I apologize for the graphic details)

"A chain was placed around his neck and he was dragged toward city hall by a growing mob; on the way downtown, he was stripped, stabbed, and repeatedly beaten with blunt objects. By the time he arrived at city hall, a group had prepared wood for a bonfire next to a tree in front of the building.[24] Washington, semiconscious and covered in blood, was doused with oil, hung from the tree by a chain, and then lowered to the ground.[27] Members of the crowd cut off his fingers, toes, and genitals.[24] The fire was lit and Washington was repeatedly raised and lowered into the flames until he burned to death. German scholar Manfred Berg posits that the executioners attempted to keep him alive to increase his suffering.[28] Washington attempted to climb the chain, but was unable to, owing to his lack of fingers.[29] The fire was extinguished after two hours, allowing bystanders to collect souvenirs from the site of the lynching, including Washington's bones and links of the chain.[24] One attendee kept part of Washington's genitalia;[30] a group of children snapped the teeth out of Washington's head to sell as souvenirs."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching_of_Jesse_Washington

The sending of Lynching Postcards was so prevalent that the Postmaster General banned the sending of such cards.

In the context of 19th and 20th Century U.S. history, lynching does mean killing - and mostly of black people.

In the southern United States the etymology is directly linked to Judge Charles Lynch and Captain William Lynch, who are credited with coining the term "Lynch Law".

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching#Etymology

And now USA practices much more humane (but also widespread) approach of locking the same people in prisons.

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