Morbid Fact Du Jour for December 22, 2013

Today’s Southern Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, two or three black southerners were hanged, burned at the stake, or quietly murdered every week in the American South.  In the 1890s, lynchings claimed an average of 139 lives each year, 75 percent of them black.  The numbers declined in the following decades, but the percentage of black victims rose to 90 percent.  Between 1882 and 1968, an estimated 4,742 blacks met their deaths at the hands of lynch mobs.  As many if not more blacks were victims of legal lynchings (speedy trials and executions), private white violence, and “nigger hunts,” murdered by a variety of means in isolated rural sections and dumped into rivers or creeks.

Culled from: Without Sanctuary

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