Lynchings

ID: 050615.1530

A June 13, 2005 MSNBC story, Senate apologizes for inaction on lynchings, reports the Senate apologized for having failed to make lynching a federal crime. Despite seven presidents petitioning Congress to pass such a law, nearly 200 anti-lynching bills introduced, and with the House passing three of them, the Senate still has not passed an anti-lynching law. Instead, it passed a nonbinding resolution apologizing for not having done so.

The MSNBC story goes on to quote Tusgekee University records documenting 4,743 Americans lynched in the 86 year period between 1882 and 1968, with 3,446 (73%) being black Americans. The Tuskegee data also show about three-quarters of the lynchings occured in ten, mostly southern states: Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida.

If black Americans were evenly distributed throughout the US during the study period, this would indicate unusual bias and violence in these ten states. It may be however, these states also had high proportions of black Americans, and would naturally have higher absolute numbers of black victims. Demographic data can easily resolve this question.

By coincidence, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner's 2005 book, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, quotes Tuskegee Institute data to provide a decade-by-decade tabulation of blacks lynched in the US during this same period:

1890-1899	1,111
1900-1909	791
1910-1919	569
1920-1929	281
1930-1939	119
1940-1949	31
1950-1959	6
1960-1969	3

Levitt's total however, is 16% lower than MSNBC's: 2,911 blacks lynched in the eighty year period from 1890 through 1969. Presumably, this means the difference, 535, were lynched in the seven year period between 1882 and 1889; on average, 76 per year, or 760 during the decade from 1870-1889. If true, it begs the question why lynchings increased in the decade before 1890.

Levitt's purpose in presenting these data is that there were "more lynchings of blacks between 1900 and 1909, when the Ku Klux Klan was dormant, than during the 1920s, when the Klan had millions of members." Moreover, "relative to the size of the black population, lynchings were exceedingly rare. To be sure, one lynching is one too many. … Compare the 281 victims of lynchings in the 1920s to the number of black infants who died as a result of malnutrition, pneumonia, diarrhea, and the like. As of 1920, about 13 out of every 100 black children died in infancy, or roughly 20,000 children each year — compared to 28 people who were lynched in a year. As late as 1940, about 10,000 black infants died each year."

As noted in my May 19, 2005 blog, the 1936 film Fury, based on the 1933 lynchings of Jack Holmes and Harold Thurmond in St. James Park in San Jose, CA, has a lawyer "inform the audience that in the previous half century [1886-1936], over 6,000 people had been lynched by mobs in the United States." This number is 27% larger than MSNBC's value for a period 42% shorter! Clearly Fritz Lang exaggerated the number for dramatic effect.

Beyond such nit-picking however, is an elephant in the room. Lynchings of black Americans declined precipitously over the study period, without the Senate, passing any anti-lynching legislation. What then, was the Senate apologizing for? If anything, history shows the absence of anti-lynching legislation had no effect on stopping this criminal behavior. (I outright reject the notion that absence of legislation caused lynchings to decrease.)

Anti-lynching legislation was never required because lynch mobs were already committing a crime: murder. This is in fact, the plot of Fury. When an intended lynching victim — Spencer Tracy — escapes murder at the hands of a mob, he conspires to bring the mob to trial for murder. The problem in bringing lynch mobs to justice was not the absence of anti-lynching laws, but corruption of the court system itself. Witnesses were intimidated: A crime. Witnesses gave false testimony: A crime. Evidence was removed or altered: A crime.

Rather than passing redundant laws, and meaningless (nonbinding) apologies, the Senate might spend its time more productively. Leave the drama to Hollywood.

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