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To: 8bits who wrote (16448)	4/4/2007 3:18:56 PM
From: Slagle	Respond to of 219761

8bits, "4,743 people who were lynched in the United States between 1882 and 1968" This sort of stuff is just bad history. Let me give you an example: In the Georgia town from where I came, years ago a cousin was county historian, writing two county histories of the place. Back in the 1960's she became interested in the history of lynching in our area, writing a couple of articles for the local newspaper on the topic. This woman, then an elderly widow who lived to be over 100 years old, had devoted her whole adult life to local history, her knowledge of every family in the area, black or white, was encyclopedic. She dived into this with her usual energy and ferreted out two possible lynchings that had occurred, one in the 1880's and another in the 1920's. She finally concluded that neither case was a lynching and she came to this conclusion by extensive interviews with the surviving family members and others who were alive then, and existing records in the court house, newpaper archives and elsewhere. How could any later day researcher arrive at some number like 4,743? They couldn't of course, it would not be possible. First of all there was no reporting requirement or even a method by which such data could be compiled in those bygone days as murder and the like were state and local matters and not reported to Washington, despite what the Wikapedia article states. How do I know that? Well, for one thing one of my ancestors was the United States Commissioner for the Northern District of Georgia (a post which no longer exists) and HE WAS the federal government in my region during the 1890's. He did try to collect data on corn whiskey production and bales of cotton shipped, but even this was spotty. Murder statistics? Nope. There were lynchings of course, and more in some places than others, but this propagandistic approach to lynching was a product of the New Deal, and like most every thing else the New Dealers did, it was a used as a tool to expand the power of the federal government with respect to the individual states. What happened back then was that people just disappeared, after all there was no national identity like a SS# so if a person, for whatever reason, desired to vanish without a trace, all they had to do was go to the nearest train station. In our family there were two cases of this, one about 1900 where a cousin, young mother of three, apparently got tired of the routine and disappeared with a "drummer" (traveling salesman) never to be heard of again. But anyway, 4,743 unsolved murders over a nearly 90 year period in this vast country is not very many anyway, running around fifty per year or a little over one per year in each state. They dug up nearly that many bodies in Jeffery Dahmer's back yard. <grin> Slagle