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