From atrios, quite a chilling little document, in case you had not seen it. (See also Dave Kopel’s excellent NRO article about the Dixiecrat platform, Jim Crow laws, and the — unsurprising — finding that there is no mention of national defense or a balanced budget therein.)

You will notice that one aspect of the ballot is a description of a “vicious” anti-lynching proposal by Truman. This lead me to a Yale article which included some statistics about the practice of lynching, said to include not just death by hanging, but also drawing and quartering, shooting, and burning:

PEOPLE LYNCHED, 1889-1918

WHITES—702

Men—691

Women—11

BLACKS—2,522

Men—2,472

Women—50

TOTAL—*3,224

*The total could go as high as 3,405 but 181 victims(43 Whites, 138 Blacks) were not included because of imperfections in available data. (NAACP, p.7)

DISTRIBUTION 1889-1918

North—219

South—2,834

West—156

LYNCHINGS-SOUTHERN STATE DISTRIBUTION, 1889-1918

1. Georgia—386

2. Mississippi—373

3. Texas—335

4. Louisiana—313

5. Alabama—276

6. Arkansas—214

7. Tennessee—178

8. Florida—178

9. Kentucky—169

You can see that, on a per capita basis, Mississippi appears to have been the lynching capital of the United States.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 14th, 2002 at 5:48 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.