On Jun 23, 2007, at 9:12 PM, Lyle E. Browning wrote:
> But, I do have to question whether it was ever legal to watch a
> lynching. Lynching was murder, pure and simple. The vast crowds so
> memorialized in those macabre photos and postcards would today
> presumably be charged as accessories. Would I be correct in assuming
> that laws were written outlawing the watching of lynching as a
> response to it?
>
>
Unfortunately, no, you would not be correct to assume anything like
that.
Between the end of the Civil War and the 1960s, there were thousands of
lynchings. Most, though not all, the victims were black. They took
place in just about every state, but were disproportionately
concentrated in the band of states that curves south and west from
South Carolina to Texas, with Mississippi having the greatest number.
Virginia was not among the states with the highest numbers of
lynchings, but there were surely some here.
State laws to inhibit lynchings were lax to nonexistent. Even had they
been stronger, they would have been generally irrelevant. Lynchings
were a primitive form of community "justice" that took the law into its
own hands. They did indeed have the support of a large segment of the
white community wherever they took place. As Anita has suggested,
those who found them horrific were nevertheless cowed into silence
(after all, might they have been next?). Why would a local sheriff,
for example, risk his job and perhaps his own life to stop a lynching,
even if he opposed it?
The impotence or indifference of the Southern justice system in the
face of lynchings made the enactment of a Federal anti-lynching law a
major goal for African Americans and their political allies for much of
the 20th century. In 1919 the NAACP published a report, "Thirty Years
of Lynching, 1889-1919," that launched its campaign for Federal
anti-lynching legislation. The campaign wasn't successful in getting
legislation passed, but it did greatly increase the visibility of the
issue and may have helped reduce the number of lynchings accordingly.
Some 200 anti-lynching bills were introduced in Congress from the 1920s
until the 1950s or so. The House passed three of them; the Senate,
none, so none became law. Southern senators used filibusters and other
maneuvers to kill the bills.
In 2005 the Senate issued a formal apology for its failure to pass a
Federal anti-lynching law.
-- Jurretta Heckscher
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