Why We Need the New Lynching Memorial

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Why do you think majority of black men were lynched during the 19th century? Why do you think it is written in history books that these lynchings were racially motivated? The racial tension during the South during that era paired with the recent freedom of blacks
 
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Dude, read accounts of lynchings. Compare ones with black victims to ones with white victims. The perpetrators did not hide their motives. We are not just making this up.
 
Majority of those lynched were blacks so they elected to memorialize them.
 
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I think you can just Google lynchings to understand the atmosphere and historical context of the 19th century lynchings
 
No, but A) I don’t think a memorial has to explicitly recognize every variation on a trend to be valid and B) I haven’t seen any evidence that white people were lynched for similar reasons. Surely you can find examples of men on the frontier strung up without a lot of legal process (which is, of course, also wrong) but I don’t know of any examples in which the hanging was motivated by hatred of white people as opposed to “we’re pretty sure you stole some cattle so that’s good enough.”
 
Dude, read accounts of lynchings. Compare ones with black victims to ones with white victims. The perpetrators did not hide their motives. We are not just making this up.
Great. So you’ve read accounts of lynchings? How many have you read? So why were the Whites lynched? Let’s first take a state where a more significant number of Blacks were lynched. So in Virginia 17 Whites were lynched and 83 Blacks. Why were most Whites lynched in Virginia? Let’s do the same for Illinois where 15 Whites were lynched and 19 Blacks. By the way Illinois was a southern state, right? Anyway, besides explaining it to me please give me a few cases from each state so I can read up on this.
I think you can just Google lynchings to understand the atmosphere and historical context of the 19th century lynchings
I think that is the problem. People think a quick search of Google is enough to understand an issue.
 
Why do you think majority of black men were lynched during the 19th century? Why do you think it is written in history books that these lynchings were racially motivated?
Writers of history books are often not as impartial as you might think.

However, the South was in disarray during the Reconstruction era in the late 19th century.

Race may well have had something to do with it, but there were racists in the north as well. So that’s not the whole explanation.
 
Writers of history books are often not as impartial as you might think.
Unfortunately I don’t think most opinions expressed have even been formed by reading biased books. The strong opinions just are and are beyond question.
Race may well have had something to do with it, but there were racists in the north as well. So that’s not the whole explanation.
To be clear, I of course don’t doubt race was a factor.
 
The absence of evidence. I’m not claiming to be the smartest bear in the woods, but I’m reasonably well read and I’ve never come across anything indicating there was widespread, racially motivated lynching of white people in the US.
 
What are other possible explanation for that statistic? Present me to impartial historical sources on lynchings. I still I don’t understand how memorializing the lynchings of blacks is considered racist.
 
We don’t have to. But when we make a memorial for just one race that is problematic. Isn’t it?
No, especially when justice for the victims of these crimes was systematically denied and even the history of those injustices was suppressed.
 
No, especially when justice for the victims of these crimes was systematically denied and even the history of those injustices was suppressed.
Isn’t justice denied to every victim of a lynching? Isn’t that what a lynching is? Just because a person belongs to a particular group doesn’t mean the injustice of his murder should be ignored. Right?
 
I trust PBS, NAACP, my college history books. I want to know your sources that prove that we cannot know for certain whether these lynchings were racially motivated. Whatever. I don’t see anything racist about memorializing black victims of lynch mobs.
 
What are other possible explanation for that statistic? Present me to impartial historical sources on lynchings. I still I don’t understand how memorializing the lynchings of blacks is considered racist.
The lack of civil order in many areas in the Reconstruction era could certainly contribute. There was racism in the north, too. But a lot fewer lynchings. The north had more civil order.

I don’t think the memorial that they are building in Alabama is “racist” at all. But I’d like to know what kind of reaction they expect from the different groups that will be viewing it.
 
Look, you seem to acknowledge that lynching was disproportionately used against blacks. Presumably, you also inferred that that was the case for racist reasons.

For that reason alone, a memorial specifically to black victims is fine. We’re memorializing the disproportionality with which blacks were terrorized, not everyone who was ever hung anywhere for any reason.
 
If majority of lynchings occurred to blacks, why is memorializing that racist? That’s what I don’t understand.
 
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