I was reading an editorial this morning by Jonathan Kay about how Pepsi began systematically marketing to blacks in the 30’s, figuring that it was a vast, untapped market. They did this by sending black salesman around the country. While I found the topic interesting, a quote from the editorial gave me pause:
“As late as the 1950s, lynchings remained common in many parts of the U.S. south.”
As a cynic, I have to ask the question…
Were lynchings really all that common? After all, we all “know” that witches were burned at the stake in Salem, that legislators in Washington DC actually write laws, and that an alien craft crashed at Roswell…
I’m not asking if they ever happened. I know that at least some did. I just wonder if they were as common as “they” would have us believe…
there was one lynching in 1951 and three in 1955. There weren’t very many (compared to previous decades) in the 1940’s. While it’s true that there were four lynchings in the 1950’s, the period of lynching more or less ended in the 1940’s.
Well, here’s a yearly breakdown that indicates that while lynchings still occurred in the 1950’s, they probably couldn’t be described as “common”. Obviously, though, one is too many, and in the context of the Pepsi article, those salesmen were still taking a real risk if they seemed “uppity”.
I also think you would have to take into account the risk of beatings, framings, and simply being run out of town when you are looking at the safety of black men in the South. Still lynchings, as the statistics show, were fairly rare after the 1920s.
In Freakonomics, this is discussed. Apparently, lynchings were much more common around the turn of the century and dwindled by mid-century. The author concluded that lynchings were less common because they had the desired effect, i.e. terrorizing southern black people to the point that they were no longer “uppity”.
I agree with a caveat. Prior to the 1870s, “lynching” could mean hanging or it could mean tar-and-feathering or beatings or other actions. If we kept that same definition (which is not likely, but is possible, for a person discussing race relations in the U.S.), then “lynchings” in the sense of violent physical intimidation very definitely continued into the 1960s.
Of course, an author that wrote to that effect regarding activities in the 20th century would probably be misleading to most readers subsequent to the 1960s who were probably not aware of any meaning that did not include hanging.
This passage from Huckleberry Finn is an interesting take on the overall phenomenon:
The Shurburn monolouge is one of my favorite passages–it’s so very bitter. The novel is set before the heyday of lynchings, of course, but written as they were becoming more common, and Twain was a pretty keen obsever of human nature.
I presume “lynching”, lethal or not, refers to a deliberately public display. What about any number of people who were simply killed with no witnesses and the body disposed of?