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