A lot of reporting has been made in recent news about "Black Lynchings" with the total number being reported, higher and higher, each year. These reports and "statistics" have been provided almost exclusively by Civil Rights Advocates who also have a financial incentive in regards to funding their non-profit organizations (with 5 and 6-figure salaries) and also their projects like Civil Rights Museums and even tourist attractions like Slave Museums and Slave Ships.
Unfortunately for them, this hyping of "lynching" stats doesn't even match their own ever-growing statistical "lynching" numbers. According to the below references, at the height of lynching between the years 1,890 to 1,900, there were "supposedly" around 175 lynchings of Blacks per year.
Yet, using 8 million as the Total Average Black US population between 1890 to 1900, that averages to be one lynching per 45,000 Blacks. This number is in the same ballpark as getting hit by lightning.
First Question: Are the lynchings what you see on TV, Internet, and Magazines either
(a) photos
or
(b) hand-drawn illustrations of lynchings?
Second, is this the same lynching, but photos (or illustrations) by many different news journalists as lynchings were sometimes advertised to neighboring towns. That is, in Today's news, the Main Stream Media can take a single event and all their journalists write their version of this same event.
Third, wouldn't it be highly unusual to have a photo (or even a hand-drawn illustration) without a name, reason, and victim? Also, someone would have to tell the journalist beforehand about this lynching so this same journalist would have to travel by horseback to write about a lynching as they didn't have the Internet back then, or Facebook, or even an automobile.
Four, how can you have thousands of photos and pictures of lynchings, yet, essentially zero names, zero locations, zero exact dates, zero victims, and zero exact crime committed?
That is, some say they didn't keep records of lynchings, yet, why print and publish photos and hand-drawn illustrations without any names, locations, dates, victims, and crimes committed? Wouldn't newspapers "sell" far more copies if you had at least a small written story behind each photo or hand-drawn illustration? Or are the lynching pictures you see today forgeries of both long ago and even Today?
Note, back then journalists would write whatever they want just to sell copies as who could fact check back then? Those Civil War era tabloid newspapers had to write whatever it took (e.g., old stories, sensationalized stories, and gossip) just to get people to buy them and make ends meet.
The odds of getting hit by lightning in your lifetime in today's world is like 1 in 12,000 using a life expectancy of like 78.
Note, back in the 1,900, you only lived approximately to 50 years of age. But there were far fewer people. Yet, on the other hand, many more people spent their time outdoors than Today.
Using the numbers above, a Black person, during the height of lynching, had a three times higher chance of getting hit by lightning than getting lynched. (Perhaps an even higher chance of getting hit by lightning, as while their lives were shorter back then and they spent way more time in the fields and outdoors.)
Some will say the above numbers and analysis is flawed. Regardless, if lynching was even in the range of getting struck by lighting, the chance of getting lynched was highly remote which is the opposite of what is being hyped by Today's historians and media.
Moreover, at least 40% of all lynchings were due to murder with 22% being an unknown for the reason to be lynched.
Hence, it appears (in general), there were legitimate reasons, like murder, for the lynchings in the past. And that lynchings occurred very rarely. Which is unlike what some on the Left who say that lynchings were a common event in the past.
The are some historians and Civil Rights activists who say that many court records in regards to lynchings were destroyed by "racists". However, why put a lot of care into Lynching court records when something rarely happens, and you have far more important things to do to put food on the table? And just in case you didn't know, there were no Wal-Marts, MRE's 911, Welfare, Food Stamps, etc. back then.
--- In other words, there were very little court records to take care of back then....and being a judge during colonial and civil war days was like their 2nd or 3rd job as there was nothing really to do in the court systems back then as crime was almost non-existent.
--- Back then, with crime so low, Whites were working with Blacks side by side for hundreds of years, Civil War or not, and then you lynch your own co-worker / neighbor you have seen for years, decades? Sundays was for God and Church, Divorce almost non-existent and the same with sex outside marriage, almost non-existent. 4,000 lynchings or 175 lynching per year? That doesn't make much economic sense or common sense.
On some lynchings, they can say with great detail, "he got lynched for not addressing the police officer with the title 'mister'". Yet with most lynchings, they have no idea the name of the person, or the reason why they were lynched, (20%). Seems like the reporting was all over the map.
BELOW ARE SOME RESPONSES TO LYNCHING NEWS ARTICLES
--- You are Erasing History? Or Erasing "Making it up as we go along" History?
The more questions that are asked..... those 4,000 lynchings seems like a compilation of newspapers "gossip" columns.
--- Back, then, there were far fewer people, everyone knew everyone else. Hence, how can a lynching be published with partial info in a newspaper? Unless it was just gossip to sell newspapers and keep everyone interested? If there was ZERO CRIME, ZERO SLEEPING AROUND, ZERO TABLOID, back then, what are you going to write about to keep people PAYING for a newspaper?????
--- When they list total counts of lynchings by state, year and type, shouldn't they have solid raw data to back that up?
How can they possibly list all these overall lynching counts, yet not have names readily available in that same news article?
How did that journalist or reporter write that story? Did they write,
"Hey, there was a lynching in this city for this reason, but that's all I know. I can't tell you the name and where he lived or if he had a wife and children or who he worked for. Yes, this is a super small town, and everyone knows each other, but sorry, I heard it from someone at the saloon, and I am just reporting what I heard."
Wouldn't it be great to see all the news articles on 4,000 lynchings because how can anyone imagine a reporter writing something like that? In other words, you have all these historic researchers who can give all these lynching counts and statistics but they have no individual details.
--- But the fact remains, how do you write a newspaper article about a lynching with no basic info like, (a) Who was lynched, (b) For what reason, (c) exactly where it happened and (d) when. If all you can write is "I heard there was a lynching in the city of blah, blah, and it happened a little while ago,", then you have to ask, "How can this news article be taken seriously?"
And what about lynching because of Murder? No information on who was murdered, why they were murdered and how and with what weapon? Where is that family of the murdered? How in the world can you write about that 40% on lynching due to murder, yet don't list the other vital facts of the murder that led to a lynching?
Finally, the functional and publicly available data sets contain only a fraction
of the actual data recorded. The Tuskegee data are available on the web by year and race or by
state and race for the entire period but not by state, year, race, and victim's name. The same is
true for the data contained in NAACP (1919). This would make matching names to Census and
other data and estimation using panel data, e.g., random or fixed-effects models, difficult
without adding further information from the underlying records - Converging to a National Lynching Database: Recent Developments and the Way Forward (PDF Download Available)
--- More Questions: If 40% of the lynchings were Murder and most were in Southern states like Mississippi, Louisiana, Florida, and Texas, would not Blacks have to be murdering more Whites back then to deserve a Lynching?
Does the above make sense back then in the 1890's when there was almost Zero Crime, almost Zero Divorce, no Welfare, and no Food Stamps?
How can you have all these Lynchings in the South due to Murder, yet almost zero crimes like Robbery, theft, etc. Does that make sense? Forty Percent Lynches on Murder? Or, who was Murdered and a list of the demographics of those victims if you can eventually show the names lynched?
If some Blacks in the 1890s really hated Whites back then, why not also steal, rob, or have massive theft? This lynching data doesn't make sense with overall crime almost being non-existent back then.
The WPA Narratives (a.k.a. Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States) interviews 85 to 100-year-old Ex-Slaves and tells of "unspeakable" cruelty. But for some reason these ex-slaves outlived the general population by double the average American Life Expectancy of 48 years old, in the year 1900 (and most likely a lot less in the years 1830 of the Civil War). Hence, there was unspeakable cruelty but slaves lived 35 to 50 years longer than everyone else? What type of cruelty is that? "Unspeakable", of course! We wouldn't want anyone to know how to live that long, would we?
SUMMARY:
WPA Slave Narratives = Another Bernie Madoff Like Research Scam
NOTE: With these WPA Narratives, you cannot have the ex-slaves read their own narratives or re-interview them to "verify" what they said as were already on their death bed...how convenient.
#1 - WPA Narratives are basically responses to sneaky polling questions.
#2 - WPA Narratives are basically cherry picked and use only the most sensational story tellers.
#3 - WPA Narratives have no way to verify their story.
#4 - WPA Narratives have no way to verify if their stories were not "sensationalized".
#5 - WPA Narratives are very easy to add a fake sentence to an informant.
So, how do 388,000 slaves eventually grow to become 4,000,000 slaves in around 300 years of slave trade and where many slaves lived to 100 years old with "Unspeakable Cruelty"???
And "who" paid for the food and shelter for 388K slaves to become 4M slaves? And "who" made all those businesses, agricultural, and economic decisions for 388K slaves to internally grow and become 4M slave?
> "Between 1525 and 1866, in the entire history of the slave trade to the New World, according to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, 12.5 million Africans were shipped to the New World. 10.7 million survived the dreaded Middle Passage, disembarking in North America, the Caribbean and South America. And how many of these 10.7 million Africans were shipped directly to North America? Only about 388,000. That's right: a tiny percentage."
- How Many Slaves Landed in the U.S.? | The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross | PBS
Unlike what you see in Today's world with lots to read about, most people, back then, worked many hours through physical labor. Moreover, there were No Electric Lights to read during the day or nite. There was no Internet for source fact checking or even basic communication. Everything was by letter (via horseback) or word of mouth. Hence, not much to read in regards to an expensive-to-print newspaper to justify the spending money buying one.
In other words, Money was really tight back then.
Printing a newspaper wasn't that easy back then, and there was way more work to just print a news paper back then than press a button like you can Today.
And
in the 1860's, many newspapers were only four pages long, all text.
Nevertheless, Newspaper Reporters had to keep their job. Hence, why not write anything and everything you hear?
Note, the Year 1,871 was only 6 years after the devasting American Civil War. So you have to ask yourself the reliability of reporting back then.
On one hand, the articles says the newspapers, e.g. LA Times, covered the event up. But then says the event was so savage it bumped the Great Chicago Fire off the front page of The New York Times. So why are we only hearing about this the first time 130 years later?
WHERE IS RAW DATA?
So why not produce the front page headlines from all these other newspapers if it was so savage to bump the Great Chicago Fire off the front page? (so far, all there is only a 2 second view of the top half of a snippet in a video as a side article)
