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When Southern Newspapers Justified Lynching
Brent Staples
By Brent Staples
Mr. Staples is a member of the editorial board.
May 5, 20
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/05/opinion/sunday/southern-newspapers-justified-lynching.html
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Historians have paid scant attention to the role that the white Southern press played in the racial terrorism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which saw thousands of African-Americans hanged, burned, drowned or beaten to death by white mobs. This issue surfaced in dramatic fashion recently when the nearly two-centuries-old Montgomery Advertiser printed a front-page editorial apologizing for lynching coverage that dehumanized black victims. The apology coincided with the recent opening in Montgomery, Ala., of a memorial to lynching victims, and it sets the stage for a timely discussion of a deeply dishonorable period in Southern press history.
The bloody celebration at which 500 jeering spectators saw Henry Lowery burned to ashes was held at Nodena, Ark., on Jan. 26, 1921. Among those in attendance was a reporter for The Memphis Press whose story under the headline Kill Negro by Inches validated the barbaric proceedings and cataloged the victims suffering in lurid detail, noting that Lowery remained stoically silent even after the flesh had dropped away from his legs and the flames were leaping toward his face.
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Newspapers even bragged about the roles they had played in arranging particularly spectacular lynchings. But the real damage was done in terse, workaday stories that justified lynching by casting its victims as fiends, brutes, born criminals or, that catchall favorite, troublesome Negroes. The narrative that tied blackness inextricably to criminality and to the death penalty survived the lynching era and lives on to this day.
The Montgomery Advertiser was historically opposed to lynching. Nevertheless, when its current staff scrutinized the papers lynching-era coverage, they concluded that it had conveniently opposed lynching in the abstract while responding with indifference to its bloody, real-world consequences. The editors found that the paper too often presumed without proof that lynching victims were guilty and that, in doing so, it advanced the aims of white supremacist rule.
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The newspaper editor Ira Harkey, who was white, incurred outrage in 1949 when he abandoned the Southern journalistic practice of automatically labeling black people by race in stories and began cautiously extending the courtesy title Mrs. in the pages of The Pascagoula Chronicle-Star to certain carefully selected Negro women such as teachers and nurses. Harkey was reviled and shot at by racists in Mississippi for championing civil rights. He wrote bitterly of his earlier years at The New Orleans Times-Picayune, where there was a flat rule that Negroes were not to appear in photographs; it was required that they be airbrushed out of crowd scenes.
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Bro Krift, now the papers 41-year-old executive editor, was well aware of this history when he greeted the opening of the lynching memorial by devoting the Advertisers front page to the names of victims alongside its bluntly worded editorial acknowledging the papers complicity. Speaking of the memorial in a recent telephone interview, Mr. Krift said: I realized, holy Moses, this could change the narrative for the rest of time in America. This could be the physical representation of the conversation we need to have in America.
barbtries
(28,811 posts)heard about it on twitter for the first time. i found i could not read it straight through but browsed most of the stories.
https://www.amazon.com/100-Years-Lynchings-Ralph-Ginzburg/dp/0933121180/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1525666529&sr=8-1&keywords=100+years+of+lynchings&dpID=41yR3uQfJML&preST=_SY344_BO1,204,203,200_QL70_&dpSrc=srch
the lynchings were reported; the innocence of many of the victims was reported; the failure to allow justice run its course was reported. nobody was ever prosecuted.
white people are savage.
marble falls
(57,257 posts)barbtries
(28,811 posts)it is all just newspaper articles from IIRC 1862 to 1962. it was published in 1962 or 1963. i had never heard of it until a month or 2 ago either.
things we were never taught in school. history, for instance, the true unvarnished history of this nation.
marble falls
(57,257 posts)I can understand why there is not much discussion. Its so wrong there isn't much to discuss, and the shame of having to admit that even a passive support of lynching is so very evil, too.