Few men in the history of US politics have had the ability to lie so shamelessly—and defile by his presence anything sacred— as Obama. A genuine disgrace to his race, which sadly, as the image illustrates, continues to blindly support him.

His remarks on the Supreme Court rulings on marriage equity and Obamacare were just as disingenuous – a testimony to a serial liar.  Saying “(o)ur nation was founded on a bedrock principle that we are all created equal” is entirely opposite the way it’s governed.

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The rapid unraveling of the confederate flag reverence is testimony to the power of mass cultural pressure exerted by the media and leading unified political figures.

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Remember: All captions and pullquotes are furnished by the editors, NOT the author(s). 

What is $5 a month to support one of the greatest publications on the Left?

Steven Jonas, MD, MPH

Special to The Greanville Post | Commentary No. 10:“The Charleston Massacre and the Coming Second Civil War”

Dylann Roof: A diseased mind, product of a sick culture, where sociopathies are swept under the rug, and often encouraged.

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he Charleston Massacre means many things.  Most importantly it means that the Doctrine of White Supremacy that drove the Institution of Slavery, and drove what became the Confederate States of America to secession from the Union, is still alive and quite well, in the citizenry at large.  (The seemingly increasing succession of white cop/black victim murders of course has been raising the poisonous topic in the public consciousness in the past year or two; see my column “Ferguson Worked as Intended.”)  But now here it is, writ large, in the person of a violent, young, openly and proudly defiant white supremacist.  Interestingly enough, Roof not only reflects the sentiments of the native US white supremacy movement, but of its international relatives as well.  (The Southern Poverty Law Center is a very important source of information of right-wing hate/potential http://www.splcenter.org/terror organizations in the United States.)

I have written previously on the topic of “how the South won the Civil War” and the coming Second Civil War.  With this particular horror perpetrated, not by a “lone gunman,” not by a “whack job,” as Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina would have us think, but by a self-conscious representative of the hate groups to be found all over the United States.  (Interestingly enough, when the Department of Homeland Security, at the beginning of the Obama Administration, attempted to start an investigation of potential, domestic, right-wing terrorism, it was shut down fairly quickly by Republicans in Congress.)  The principal element in the victory of the South in the Civil War has been the spreading of the Doctrine of White Supremacy (invented in the 17^th century to justify white-on-black slavery) from the South throughout the land.

This outrage (responded to, as is by now well-know, by the Right’s Propaganda Central as an “assault on Christians,” which would be funny if it itself were not so outrageous), has brought the Doctrine openly back onto the national agenda.  In the current debate, it is symbolized by the Confederate Battle flag that flies on the grounds of the State Capitol of the Home of the Confederacy, South Carolina.  And that flag it turns out, is indeed an apt representation for the Doctrine that drove slavery and the Confederate States of America, and has now, as I said, spread across our land.  In my previous columns on the South, the Civil War, and what it really was about, I regularly quote the well-known statement by the CSA Vice-President Alexander Stephens, justifying slavery, on the basis of the Doctrine. 

What has very recently come to wide public attention is the statement by the designer of the aforementioned flag, which was created only in 1863.  That designer, one William T. Thompson, said: 

“As a people, we are fighting to maintain the heaven ordained supremacy of the white man over the inferior or colored race; …. we still think that battle flag on a pure white filed would be more appropriate and handsome [than its predecessor].  Such a flag would be a suitable emblem of our young confederacy, and sustained by the brave hearts and strong arms of the south, it would soon take rank among the proudest ensigns of the nations, and be hailed by the civilized world as THE WHITE MAN’S FLAG.”

It indeed represents, as claimed by many Southerners (thinking that they are somehow justifying its continued use as some kind of “historical reference,” not only in the South but all over the country) the “heritage of the South,” for the maintenance of the Doctrine of White Supremacy is central to that heritage.

And it is central to the heritage of the modern Republican Party.  That heritage stems, not from its beginnings, of course, but from the Compromise of 1877 that ended Reconstruction and brought on the White Racist Southern “Reclamation” that eventually led to Jim Crow and 100 years of the denial of civil rights of any kind in the South, led by the Southern Democrats, until the mid-1960s, when the national party seriously took up the cause of Civil Rights.  And the Doctrine found its modern home, through Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” and what has followed it.  Which brings us once again to the topic of the “Second Civil War,” which we shall continue to return to over time.

The Charleston Nine. Racism can (and does) kill in America, systematically. Al Qaeda does not. Yet racists and violent rightwing extremists are rarely called terrorists. 

The First Civil War, at its beginning was a clash between the two dominant branches of the ruling class, Northern and Southern, over A) the expansion of the institution of slavery into the Western territories and B) over the role of government.  The growing Northern manufacturing sector did not want slavery in the territories. 

For one major reason, it is difficult to grow industry without some modicum of education for the workers, while it is difficult to maintain slavery if the slaves are educated.  Also, they had already figured out that the doctrine of “free labor” which was well under development at the time, meant that they had to take little or no responsibility for the living conditions of their wage-slaves, whereas if one owned real slaves one had to at least clothe, house, and feed them.  Also, the nascent manufacturing class loved “big government,” especially in the arena of massive public works, like the construction of the trans-continental railway and the establishment of public “land-grant” colleges, both favorites, as it happened, of Abraham Lincoln.   

The Southern ruling class wanted to maintain and expand slavery, both to expand agriculture and to sell more slaves, and also wanted as little “government interference” in anything except such matters as catching and returning runaway slaves (sound familiar?)  And so came the War, and then Abolition.  But once the Northern ruling class realized that with the disappearance of formal slavery but with the return of the South to a system similar to it in many ways, through “Reclamation,” it did not need to worry about the latter.  They could just “get on with it,” with the two branches of the ruling class for the most part eventually becoming one.  The ruling class appears on the surface to be represented by the Republican Party alone, but in fact its overall interests are fully protected by the reigning political Duopoly.

[dropcap]B[/dropcap]ut in our times the Republican branch of he Duopoly does make special use of the Doctrine of White Supremacy that has so splashed across the nation’s consciousness since the Charleston Massacre.  As a rising, white, border state politician once said about the Republicans on the subject of race and racism:

“For 12 years, Republicans have tried to divide us – race against race – so we get mad at each other and not at them. They want us to look at each other across a racial divide so we don’t turn and look to the White House and ask, why are all of our incomes going down, why are all of us losing jobs? Why are we losing our future?  Where I come from we know about race-baiting. They’ve used it to divide us for years. I know this tactic well and I’m not going to let them get away with it.”

Yes, Bill Clinton actually said that when he announced for the Democratic nomination for the Presidency in 1991 (and, knowing nothing at  the time about the Democratic Leadership Council of which he had been the head, and what it really stood for, it was on the basis of that statement that I decided to support him in his campaign).  Of course, we never heard that sort of statement form Clinton again, but that’s another story.

The Doctrine of White Supremacy remains a major factor in U.S. politics, courtesy of the self-same Republican Party.  Its existence will once again be a major issue at the center of a Civil War in our nation.  But this time around, the ruling class is generally united.  And so the Second Civil War will be over, on the one hand, the Doctrine and its uses, but very much on the other, the authoritarian state which the ruling class is having to develop as so many workers see their incomes dropping and so many U.S. are slipping into poverty or near-poverty.  But more on the particulars of this subject anon.

It indeed represents, as claimed by many Southerners, the “heritage of the South,” for the maintenance of the Doctrine of White Supremacy is central to that heritage.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

[box] http://www.puntopress.com/jonas-the-15-solution-hits-main-distribution/, and available on Amazon. [/box]

THE NEW YORK TIMES LOOKS AT THE PROCESS OF DEEP CHANGE IN AN UNJUST SOCIETY—BUT WHAT IS THE MESSAGE?
Notice the pronounced liberal assumptions and “civilized” tone of the whole exercise, to be expected in the New York Times, in which guerrillas and rightwing state terrorists are both regarded as inherently evil. 

Can an Evil Man Change?
By ANTJIE KROG, NYTimes

Eugene de Kock at a 1998 Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearing in Johannesburg. Credit: Peter Andrews/Reuters

CAPE TOWN — South Africa’s most notorious apartheid-era assassin, Eugene de Kock, has received parole after spending 20 years in prison. The government’s decision to let him walk free has unleashed a sort of identity crisis among South Africans. Could a man once known as “Prime Evil” really have changed? Why are we showing such charity to the deadliest cog in apartheid’s racist machine? And more important, why are so many South Africans — mostly white — so angry that this specific prisoner has been freed?

Mr. de Kock was no ordinary inmate, and his crimes featured prominently in the darkest chapters of South African history. After the famous black-consciousness leader, Steve Biko, died in jail in 1977, opposition to apartheid grew. The National Party government realized it could no longer afford the political and economic consequences of activists dying in police custody. So, to continue its dirty work invisibly, a secret counterinsurgency unit was established on a farm called Vlakplaas. In 1983 Mr. de Kock became its commander, and it was from here that he and his men planned the deaths, kidnappings and torture of many anti-apartheid activists.

THIS ARTICLE IS REPRODUCED HERE FOR PURPOSES OF SOCIAL ANALYSIS AND EDUCATION UNDER TERMS OF FAIR USE, PER  17 U.S. Code § 107, AND IN CONSIDERATION THAT THE MATERIAL UNDER EXAMINATION WAS PRODUCED BY THE US PAPER OF RECORD, THE NEW YORK TIMES.

When former President F.W. de Klerk released Nelson Mandela and lifted the ban on the black opposition parties in 1990, Mr. de Kock was secretly ordered to increase the appearance of black-on-black violence in order to discredit the liberation movements. His squad killed black activists with Russian weapons to implicate the military wing of Mr. Mandela’s party, the African National Congress. They captured black liberation movement soldiers, torturing them until they “turned” and could be used as hit men. This led to a sudden escalation of deaths of black people. In one of his speeches after being released, Mr. Mandela angrily suggested that while the government was talking about negotiations, a “third force” was killing black people. Mr. de Kock and his men were part of that force.

After South Africa’s transition to democracy in 1994, Mr. de Kock disclosed the full scope of his crimes as part of his testimony before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission as both an amnesty applicant and an expert witness. This commission was set up as an example of restorative justice — granting amnesty to perpetrators of violence after they confessed in public. By telling the truth and proving that a crime was committed for political reasons, a perpetrator could receive relief from civil and criminal prosecution. Witnesses and victims of gross human rights violations also testified before the commission, and some received reparations.

As a reporter covering the often heart-rending hearings in the 1990s, I watched Mr. de Kock calmly correct facts, expose lies and name superiors who then quickly had to apply for amnesty themselves. He became the polygraph machine of the commission. Without him the “truth” part of the T.R.C. would have been sorely lacking.

Mr. de Kock received amnesty for the crimes he had committed for political reasons, but enough of his deeds remained unpardoned for South Africa’s courts to afterward find him guilty on 89 charges and sentence him to 212 years in prison.

Then the unthinkable happened. With his intimate knowledge of apartheid-era security agencies, he began to assist victims in finding the remains of loved ones. He provided answers and pointed to places where bodies could be found. Mr. de Kock openly confessed his regret directly to victims and admitted that nothing could redeem him. This contrasted sharply with many of his commanders, who openly refused to apply for amnesty, or the politicians who denied that he had carried out their orders.

To show regret was not a requirement for amnesty, so most perpetrators simply gave their testimony and disappeared scot-free into anonymous lives. During the time of the T.R.C., an army general and 19 members of the top military brass appeared in court on charges of murder and creating hit squads to destabilize the country, but after a seven-month trial, all 20 were cleared, so Mr. de Kock, as “Prime Evil,” became one of only three white men after 1994 to be jailed for atrocities committed during apartheid.

South Africans are obsessed with Mr. de Kock because his case presents us with ethical dilemmas that fundamentally challenge our ways of thinking. Some people dismiss him as a psychopath merely playing at repentance, others believe he has indeed changed.

Marjorie Jobson assisted victims’ families who wished to meet Mr. de Kock in jail. She describes him as “a treasure trove.” In meetings lasting over two hours, he told in “the finest detail exactly what had happened affecting the people in the room.” When these families left, she added, they would begin to sing “from the sheer relief of having received answers.”

This shift underlines the unspoken foundation on which the T.R.C. was initially built: that apartheid destroyed people’s humanity and turned some into murderers. Perpetrators could admit that they had done wrong and be forgiven, allowing them to rebuild their lives. The underlying goal of the T.R.C. was to build a new ethical society through change: The truth about our past should transform all of us from a people apart into a people who care for one another.

Black people, on the other hand, opted for reconciliation because they assumed white people would take responsibility for repairing what they had destroyed. After 20 years of democracy it has become clear that whites are not changing to the extent expected, and this enrages blacks. Mr. de Kock’s parole seems, once again, an example of whites benefiting.

Mr. de Kock is a problem for South African society precisely because he presents the capacity of an evil man to change.

But his parole also reminds us of something more universal: the different life he might have led, had he grown up in a different and more just society. What would he and many others have become if they were not schooled in racism, indoctrinated through religion and educated into violence to protect an unequal social order? And how much of this violence perpetrated by past generations has remained in today’s young men? The increasing number of family murders committed by young Afrikaner men in recent years (Oscar Pistorius is just the most famous of several accused) confronts us with the challenge of changing a culture that propagates machismo and violence in order to protect privilege.

It should continue to torment us that many people like Mr. de Kock who have been jailed as terrorists, guerrillas or fanatics might have — in a different world — become soft-spoken, kind and caring men.

[box] Antjie Krog is a poet, a journalist and the author of “Begging to Be Black” and “Country of My Skull.” [/box]

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 Photo showing the Laura Nelson lynching. The ugliness is still with us, albeit better concealed. Click on images to expand. 

By Tom Mackaman

[dropcap]B[/dropcap]etween the years 1877 and 1950, 3,959 lynching of black men, women and children took place in 12 states of the American South, according to a study by the Equal Justice Initiative released last week.

The data, based on five years of research in archives and on interviews with survivors and historians, reveals the extent of the racist terror that ruled in the American South for nearly three quarters of a century—between Reconstruction, the period after the American Civil War, and the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

A postcard with lynching victims sold in Kentucky in 1935.

The impact of lynching on blacks in the South, much like pogroms against Jews in czarist Russia, went far beyond those actually killed and their immediate families. “Lynchings were violent and public acts of torture that traumatized black people throughout the country and were largely tolerated by state and federal officials,” the report explains. The authors stress fear of lynching, for example, as a major factor in the Great Black Migration of millions of African Americans from the South to the urban centers of the North. They do not mention the lure of industrial jobs, but in fact the struggles for economic security and social dignity were two sides of the same coin.

The authors decry “an astonishing absence of any effort to acknowledge, discuss, or address lynching.” This is unsurprising in an area of the US still covered with monuments to racist politicians and the “heroes” that led the Confederacy of slaveholding states out of the union and into the Civil War (1861-1865). One aim of the Equal Justice Institute is to counter this prejudiced history by erecting memorials to the victims of lynching near the locations where they took place throughout the region.

Lynching of Laura Nelson in Oklahoma, 1911⁽¹⁾

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The report distinguishes among six types of lynching: “1) those that resulted from a wildly distorted fear of interracial sex; 2) lynchings in response to casual social transgressions; 3) lynchings based on allegations of a serious violent crime; 4) public spectacle lynchings; 5) lynchings that escalated into large-scale violence targeting the entire African American community; and 6) lynchings of sharecroppers, ministers, and community leaders who resisted mistreatment.”

The murder of L.D. Nelson, Laura’s son, the same day, with post-death humiliation, of course. ⁽²⁾

All of these had as their central aim the maintenance of the system of racial segregation known in the US as Jim Crow, which was fully implemented by the first years of the 20th century, and whose legal structures were not dismantled until the 1960s.

Most traumatic were the public spectacle lynchings. These were large spectator events that drew crowds sometimes numbering in the thousands, where souvenirs of body parts were often sold, alongside postcards and other mementos. The report describes several of these, among them the gruesome 1904 lynching in Doddville, Mississippi of Luther Holbert and his wife, who were accused of killing a wealthy white planter:

Both victims were tied to a tree and forced to hold out their hands while members of the mob methodically chopped off their fingers and distributed them as souvenirs. Next, their ears were cut off. Mr. Holbert was then beaten so severely that his skull was fractured and one of his eyes was left hanging from its socket. Members of the mob used a large corkscrew to bore holes into the victims’ bodies and pull large chunks of ‘quivering flesh,’ after which both victims were thrown onto a raging fire and burned. The white men, women, and children present watched the horrific event while enjoying deviled eggs, lemonade, and whiskey in a picnic-like atmosphere.

Any effort to draw attention to America’s history of racial violence merits praise, and this report offers new and valuable data. However, the authors interpret this important research in the framework of contemporary identity politics, an outlook that, in its principal American iteration, assigns social and political interests to groups of people based on race. The problem with this approach when it comes to history is that, as horrible and as clearly racist as the system of “Judge Lynch” was in the South, it is impossible to understand it outside of an analysis of the social order it upheld. It was not simply racism that gave rise to lynching, but a social system that underlay racist ideology.

The word “sharecropping,” the impoverished crop lien system that replaced slavery as the dominant form of Southern labor after the Civil War, appears only once in the report. Slavery and sharecropping were both answers to what was once commonly called the “labor question.” This reality—that the racist Southern social order was built on extreme labor exploitation—once a basic conception even for American liberals, does not figure in the report.

“My thesis is essentially that slavery—the evil of slavery wasn’t involuntary servitude,” report director Bryan Stevenson stated in an interview. “It was this narrative of racial difference, this ideology of white supremacy. And so when [R]econstruction collapsed, to restore the racial hierarchy you had to use force and violence and intimidation. And in the South that manifested itself with these lynchings.”

A victim of a Jim Crow lynching, 1925

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In other words, slavery was not a system of forced labor and all that flowed from it— the selling apart of families and children, the driver’s lash, and so on—but “this narrative of racial difference.” Likewise, racial violence in the Jim Crow South was not about extreme labor exploitation and separating blacks from the white poor, much less maintaining the one-party dictatorship of the Democratic Party—which is referred to but once in the 27-page report summary—but about maintaining “White southern identity.”

To assert that racism caused racist violence, and to go no further, is a mere tautology. With such a perspective one cannot, for example, account for events like the murder of more than 35 blacks in Thibodaux, Louisiana in 1887. The Thibodaux Massacre came in response to a strike of some 10,000 sugar cane workers organized by the Knights of Labor. Perhaps 10 percent of the strikers were white. As the state geared up for the slaughter, Louisiana Governor Samuel Douglas McEnery, himself a sugar planter, declared, “God Almighty has himself drawn the color line.”

An Atlanta Georgian headline on April 29, 1913, showing that the police suspected Frank and Newt Lee.

BELOW Marietta (Cobb County), Aug. 17, 1915. Crowd gathers around after the lynching of Leo Frank.

Stevenson also dismisses the many lynchings that took place in the US West as examples of “frontier justice” that happened because “you didn’t have a functioning justice system … so people took things in their hands.” This is simply a cliché. In a 2006 study, Ken Gonzales-Day counted 352 lynchings in California alone between 1850 and 1935. Most of the victims were workers, the great majority Mexican, Chinese or American Indian.

BELOW Joseph Mackey Brown (1851–1932), one of the ringleaders in the Leo Frank lynching. He had served two terms as the Governor of Georgia, 1909–1911 and 1912–1913.

In their summary, the authors make no effort to analyze periods in which the numbers of lynchings spiked markedly. To do so raises interesting questions.

The greatest number of lynchings took place between 1890 and 1895, about 600 in all. This was precisely the period when the Farmers Alliance and the Colored Farmers Alliance organized hundreds of thousands of sharecroppers around a shared program that was hostile to the interests of the big planters, the new industrialists and the Democratic Party. It was only after the defeat of this southern arm of the Populist movement that the full force of segregation came to the fore in the wake of the notorious 1896 Supreme Court decision, Plessy vs. Ferguson.

The next largest number of lynchings occurred between 1915 and 1920, when over 500 blacks were murdered. This corresponded to the largest strike wave in US history (1916-1922), the Russian Revolution (1917), US mobilization for WWI (1917-1918), the Great Black Migration, anti-immigrant hysteria and the First Red Scare.

BELOW The lynching of Henry Smith, Paris, Texas, 1 February 1893. This act stands out for its sheer cold-blooded brutality and wanton contempt for the law. This is the real face of American savagery that the mainstream media, from Hollywood to television, have never shown. ⁽³⁾

The report summary does not analyze the areas where lynching was most common. The data shows, however, that they were concentrated in the Deep South, and there in a relatively small number of counties. Out of all of the thousands of counties studied, a single one, Phillips County, Arkansas, in the Mississippi Delta, accounted for over 6 percent of all lynching, 243 in all.

Phillips County was the site of the 1919 Elaine Massacre in which an estimated 237 blacks were killed by a marauding mob of armed white men. At the time, black sharecroppers in the area were seeking to organize as the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America in order to demand better prices from white land owners for the cotton they produced. Phillips County was majority slave in 1860 and is today over 60 percent African American.

Number four on the lynching list, Tensas County, Louisiana, in 1910 had a population that was only 8 percent white.

Lynchings were least frequent in areas of the South removed geographically from the old plantation economy and most heavily white—North Carolina, eastern Tennessee, northern Georgia, etc. The whites of these largely mountainous areas—tellingly, these were also zones of militant resistance to the Southern Confederacy during the Civil War—are nonetheless lumped in by the report with the rest of the “White South” and equally implicated in its racial terror.

What happens if we consider lynching from the standpoint of social class? If sharecropping and wage labor in the South are considered as an extremely exploitative labor regime justified by a racist ideology and enforced by extreme violence, then the period of the authors’ study, 1877 until 1950, has interesting implications.

Their starting point, the year 1877, came in the same year as the “Great Uprising,” a sudden wave of general strikes and urban riots that swept the country from coast to coast in solidarity with striking trainmen. That struggle announced a period of extremely violent class warfare in the North, the West, and the South, that also counted its victims in the thousands. The last great labor massacre occurred on Memorial Day in 1937, when Chicago Police gunned down 10 striking steel workers.

What we then see in the period 1877 to 1950 is an extremely bloody class struggle, in the very country whose political parties, trade unions and academicians have always proclaimed more loudly than in any other that there are no social classes.

The report concludes with a political argument. It asserts that lynching did not really vanish, but now takes the form of the state executions so common in the US South. “Capital punishment remains rooted in racial terror, ‘a direct descendant of lynching,’” the report states, noting that while blacks make up 13 percent of the US population, since 1976 they have made up roughly 34 percent of all victims of the death penalty.

Race remains an undeniable factor in the American system of police repression. But just as was the case in the epochs of slavery and Jim Crow, it is ultimately an instrument of class exploitation. What has changed so markedly from those earlier periods is that today it is those who would don the mantle of “progressivism” who seek to promote the conception that race, and not class, is the decisive factor in American society.

The reactionary implications of this position are given away by the authors’ prescriptions. The problem with the death penalty, they write, is that “capital trials today remain proceedings with little racial diversity.” This is not a call for the abolition of the death penalty, but an appeal for more black leaders in its implementation. It simply ignores the legions of black mayors and police chiefs that have, since the 1960s, taken the reins of police repression in America’s cities, or for that matter, the fact that the chief law enforcement figure in the country, Barack Obama, is an African American.

Under the capitalist state, the police, prisons and death chambers are instruments of class oppression. The increasingly violent deployment of this repressive apparatus, and the threat that fascistic vigilante violence might reemerge, must be met with a unified response from the working class of all races and ethnicities.

[box]The author is a senior writer with wsws.org, organ of the Social Equality Party. [/box]

NOTES
⁽¹⁾ The barefoot corpse of lynched Laura Nelson. May 25, 1911, Okemah, Oklahoma. Gelatin silver print. Real photo postcard. 3 1/2 x 5 1/2″. Etched in the negative:”copyright-1911-g.h.farnum, okemah. okla 2898.” Stamp on reverse, “unmailable.” District Judge Caruthers convened a grand jury in June 1911 to investigate the lynching of the Laura Nelson and her son. In his instructions to the jury, he said, “The people of the state have said by recently adopted constitutional provision that the race to which the unfortunate victims belonged should in large measure be divorced from participation in our political contests, because of their known racial inferiority and their dependent credulity, which very characteristic made them the mere tool of the designing and cunning. It is well known that I heartily concur in this constitutional provision of the people’s will. The more then does the duty devolve upon us of a superior race and of greater intelligence to protect this weaker race from unjustifiable and lawless attacks.”  James Allen bought this image of Laura for $75 in a flea market.
(2) See, The Lynching of Laura and L.D. Nelson

(3) Henry Smith was born in 1876 in Texas, and would likely have attended its segregated schools. He became a handyman in Paris, Texas. He was known to have a drinking problem, which occasionally resulted in run-ins with the law. Arrested for drunkenness, he was said to have been beaten by Vance, a policeman known for his brutality mistreating prisoners.

In late January 1893, Myrtle Vance, the policeman’s three-year-old daughter, disappeared and was later found murdered. When the police found no clues to the child’s death, people in the area decided Smith must have committed the crime in retaliation for his treatment at Vance’s hands. Witnesses claimed that Smith allegedly: “picked up little Myrtle Vance … near her father’s residence, and … carried her through the central portion of the city… En route through the city he was asked by several persons what he was doing with the child.”^[1] Learning that he had been accused, Smith fled to Hope, Arkansas.

Smith was captured in Arkansas and returned as a prisoner by train to Paris. His captors, accompanied by a mob of an estimated 10,000 residents took him from his captors and placed him on a prepared carnival float. They transported him through town and out to the Paris Fairgrounds on the prairie. There organizers had built a lynching scaffold, painted with the word “Justice”.

Smith was tied up and tortured for 50 minutes by male members of the girl’s family, who thrust hot iron brands into his flesh, from his feet and legs to his head. They included Myrtle’s father, uncles, and twelve-year-old brother. A February 2, 1893 article in the New York Sun reported, “Every groan from the fiend, every contortion of his body was cheered by the thickly packed crowd.” Eventually, the family stuck the irons into his eyes and down his throat.

Finding he was still breathing, the crowd poured oil on Smith and set him on fire. According to some newspaper accounts, Smith remained alive during the burning. He was reported to have torn himself away from the post and fallen off the scaffolding, where he died. The crowd fought over the hot ashes to collect Smith’s bones and teeth as souvenirs.^{[2]
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By ROD DREHER • The American Conservative

These weren’t Crusaders sacking Constantinople. These were our fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers, doing it to the fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers of our black neighbors.

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]’ve been trying to figure out what to say about this ridiculous controversy the president sparked with his facile Crusades remarks the other day, and the overreaction by partisans of the Left and the Right. If you wait long enough, Ross Douthat will write what needs to be written, and do it better than you ever could. So he has done with this blog post, jumping off his Sunday column.

Excerpt:

The problem, in this in as many other debates, is that there seems to be little ground between being “for” and “against” a phenomenon too historically complex to meaningfully “favor” and “oppose” — which is why the religious-conservative rush to answer Obama has produced a lot of arguments (including some of those quoted by Saletan) that effectively whitewash Christian history, romanticize the bloody muddle that was medieval warfare, minimize the harsh reality of pogroms and persecutions, and otherwise present fat targets for secular eye-rolling.  … Wars fought on behalf of Christianity can only be justified as unfortunate necessities, and save in rare exceptions the faith’s warriors cannot — must not — be confused with its martyrs and its saints.

Triple lynching in Georgia, May 1892. Click to enlarge. (Public domain)

The New York Times wrote today on a new research report by an organization that has been studying lynching, and has documented almost 4,000 acts of extrajudicial murder by white mobs from the years 1877-1950. ⁽¹⁾
Most, but not all, of the deeds took place in the South. Five of the top 10 counties for lynching are in my home state, Louisiana. Here is a summary of the Equal Justice Initiative’s report. Here is an excerpt from the summary, in which the report’s authors describe the reasons why lynching occurred:

Lynchings Based on Minor Social Transgressions. Hundreds of African Americans accused of no serious crime were lynched for social grievances like speaking disrespectfully, refusing to step off the sidewalk, using profane language, using an improper title for a white person,suing a white man, arguing with a white man, bumping into a white woman, and insulting a white person. African Americans living in the South during this era were terrorized by the knowledge that they could be lynched if they intentionally or accidentally violated any social convention defined by any white person. In 1940, Jesse Thornton was lynched in Luverne, Alabama, for referring to a white police officer by his name without the title of “mister.” In 1919, a white mob in Blakely, Georgia, lynched William Little, a soldier returning from World War I, for refusing to take off his Army uniform. White men lynched Jeff Brown in 1916 in Cedarbluff, Mississippi, for accidentally bumping into a white girl as he ran to catch a train.

I picked these two out because I personally am aware of two such lynchings — one based on a fear of interracial sex, and the other based on a minor social transgression — that happened in my area in the first half of the 20th century, involving people (long dead) that I know. When you realize that people you know, men who were respected in their community during their lifetime, are actually murderers — well, this gets real, real fast.

And then there is this:

Public Spectacle Lynchings. Large crowds of white people, often numbering in the thousands and including elected officials and prominent citizens, gathered to witness pre-planned, heinous killings that featured prolonged torture, mutilation, dismemberment, and/or burning of the victim. White press justified and promoted these carnival-like events, with vendors selling food, printers producing postcards featuring photographs of the lynching and corpse, and the victim’s body parts collected as souvenirs. These killings were bold, public acts that implicated the entire community and sent a message that African Americans were sub-human, their subjugation was to be achieved through any means necessary, and whites who carried out lynchings would face no legal repercussions. In 1904, after Luther Holbert allegedly killed a local white landowner, he and a black woman believed to be his wife were captured by a mob and taken to Doddsville, Mississippi, to be lynched before hundreds of white spectators. Both victims were tied to a tree and forced to hold out their hands while members of the mob methodically chopped off their fingers and distributed them as souvenirs. Next, their ears were cut off. Mr. Holbert was then beaten so severely that his skull was fractured and one of his eyes was left hanging from its socket. Members of the mob used a large corkscrew to bore holes into the victims’ bodies and pull out large chunks of “quivering flesh,” after which both victims were thrown onto a raging fire and burned. The white men, women, and children present watched the horrific murders while enjoying deviled eggs, lemonade, and whiskey in a picnic-like atmosphere.

This was by no means a one-off thing. From the Times‘s story on the report:

The bloody history of Paris, Tex., about 100 miles northeast of Dallas, is well known if rarely brought up, said Thelma Dangerfield, the treasurer of the local N.A.A.C.P. chapter. Thousands of people came in 1893 to see Henry Smith, a black teenager accused of murder, carried around town on a float, then tortured and burned to death on a scaffold.

Until recently, some longtime residents still remembered when the two Arthur brothers were tied to a flagpole and set on fire at the city fairgrounds in 1920.

[dropcap]ISIS filmed[/dropcap] that poor Jordanian pilot burning to death as an act of revenge and terror. We call those Islamist fanatics animals. But white people did this often, and sometimes even made a public spectacle of it. “The white men, women, and children present watched the horrific murders while enjoying deviled eggs, lemonade, and whiskey in a picnic-like atmosphere.”

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Mississippi Ku-Klux in the Disguises in Which They Were Captured, 1872. They were arrested in Tishomingo County, Mississippi for attempted murder. Wood engraving from photograph, Harper’s Weekly, 27 January 1872, (Public Domain)

In the EJI report is a photo of a 1919 clipping from a Jackson, Miss., newspaper reporting on a planned lynching in Ellisville, one that the Mississippi governor absurdly claimed he was powerless to stop. The paper reported that the Rev. L.G. Gates, a Baptist pastor from Laurel, Miss., was headed to Ellisville “to entreat the mob to use discretion.”

Oh, for the days when leading Christian pastors entreated lynch mobs not to stop in the name of God, but instead, to use discretion.

See the photo that illustrates this blog post? It shows the charred remains of Jesse Washington, a black man lynched by a mob in Waco, Texas, on May 15, 1916. He had confessed under police interrogation to murdering a white woman. From the Wikipedia account of his lynching:

Washington was tried for murder in Waco, in a courtroom filled with furious locals. He entered a guilty plea and was quickly sentenced to death. After his sentence was pronounced, he was dragged out of the court by observers and lynched in front of Waco’s city hall. Over 10,000 spectators, including city officials and police, gathered to watch the attack. There was a celebratory atmosphere at the event, and many children attended during their lunch hour. Members of the mob castrated Washington, cut off his fingers, and hung him over a bonfire. He was repeatedly lowered and raised over the fire for about two hours. After the fire was extinguished, his charred torso was dragged through the town and parts of his body were sold as souvenirs. A professional photographer took pictures as the event unfolded, providing rare imagery of a lynching in progress. The pictures were printed and sold as postcards in Waco.

That was not the Middle Ages. That was 99 years ago, in Texas. The killers were not berserker jihadis. They were the people of Waco, Texas, including the leadership of the city.

Just now, as I was googling for more information, I see that Bill Moyers wrote about the Waco lynching the other day — inspired, as I was, by ISIS burning the Jordanian pilot. Excerpt:

Sure enough, there it was: the charred corpse of a young black man, tied to a blistered tree in the heart of the Texas Bible Belt. Next to the burned body, young white men can be seen smiling and grinning, seemingly jubilant at their front-row seats in a carnival of death. One of them sent a picture postcard home: “This is the barbeque we had last night. My picture is to the left with a cross over it. Your son, Joe.”

The victim’s name was Jesse Washington. The year was 1916. America would soon go to war in Europe “to make the world safe for democracy.” My father was twelve, my mother eight. I was born 18 years later, at a time, I would come to learn, when local white folks still talked about Washington’s execution as if it were only yesterday. This was not medieval Europe. Not the Inquisition. Not a heretic burned at the stake by some ecclesiastical authority in the Old World. This was Texas, and the white people in that photograph were farmers, laborers, shopkeepers, some of them respectable congregants from local churches in and around the growing town of Waco.

More Moyers:

Yes, it was hard to get back to sleep the night we heard the news of the Jordanian pilot’s horrendous end. ISIS be damned! I thought. But with the next breath I could only think that our own barbarians did not have to wait at any gate. They were insiders. Home grown. Godly. Our neighbors, friends, and kin. People like us.

I see from the graphic in the EJI report that they appear to have documented at least 10 lynchings in West Feliciana Parish, where I live. I have written EJI for a copy of the report. I want to know who was killed, and under what circumstances. We all need to know these things, and face down what our ancestors did. These weren’t Crusaders sacking Constantinople. These were our fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers, doing it to the fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers of our black neighbors. Attention must be paid. That may be the only atonement available now, but it’s better than what we have had, which is nothing.

No, the American South (and other parts of America where racial terrorists ran rampant) was never run by fanatical theocrats who used grotesque public murders as a tool of terror. But if you were a black in the years 1877-1950, this was a distinction without much meaningful difference.