{"id":258813,"date":"2022-09-19T07:25:33","date_gmt":"2022-09-19T07:25:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=258813"},"modified":"2022-09-20T12:59:32","modified_gmt":"2022-09-20T12:59:32","slug":"lynching-porn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=258813","title":{"rendered":"Lynching Porn"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jane Weir \u2013 The Unz Review Sept 15, 2022<\/strong><\/h1>\n

Lynching stories hold a central place in the history of American race politics. They are a genre of folklore, somewhere between \u201curban legends\u201d and tales of wartime atrocities. When we see references to Emmett Till, or Ahmaud Arbery, or George Floyd, or Willie McGee[1]<\/a> as \u201clynching victims,\u201d it\u2019s easy to dismiss the hyperbole as just one more tiresome invocation of victim culture.<\/p>\n

But there is a deeper significance here. Stories of extreme cruelty meted out to a black victim \u2014 torture, immolation, mutilation \u2014 have been the main driver<\/em> behind American race politics of the past century. \u201cJustice,\u201d \u201cequality,\u201d \u201ccivil rights\u201d \u2014 those goals are merely the noble-sounding face of black activism, a movement that will never be satisfied (there\u2019s never enough justice; never enough equality). What the movement is really all about \u2014 what it\u2019s always<\/em> been about \u2014 is anger and destructiveness, fueled by a never-ending, self-perpetuating cycle of Lynching Porn.<\/p>\n

In calling it \u201cporn,\u201d I don\u2019t mean to imply that there\u2019s an erotic component to lynching stories. Rather, I\u2019m comparing it to such things as \u201csnuff films\u201d and \u201ctorture porn.\u201d As you\u2019ll see, the resemblance is striking. Another analogy: From a financial angle, pornography was the<\/em> main driver <\/em>of the World Wide Web 20 years ago and probably is even now. (Here\u2019s an informative BBC business story<\/a> about it from 2019.) Meanwhile, even a cursory survey of the past 160 years finds Lynching Porn as the main fuel for race politics and civil rights agitation. Anyone who doubts this need only stroll over to the prurient-minded Equal Justice Initiative<\/a>. The EJI is one of innumerable organizations full of cant about fighting \u201cracial injustice\u201d and \u201cracial inequality.\u201d But to judge by its website, it\u2019s mostly about celebrating violence and victimhood.<\/p>\n

Lynching Porn first occurred to me as an idea in early 2020, when the Emmett Till Antilynching Bill was before the House of Representatives. I thought I\u2019d do a little research on the past century of failed anti-lynching legislation. I ran across a lurid little book that came out in 1962 called 100 Years of Lynchings<\/em>. What stood out for me was not the garish \u201cbloody America\u201d cover on my Kindle version, but the author\u2019s name: Ralph Ginzburg. Because Ginzburg was a man of many interests and careers, but what he\u2019s mainly remembered for is being a \u2014 well \u2014 pornographer.<\/p>\n

Ginzburg was found guilty of \u201cobscenity\u201d (specifically, sending an erotically themed magazine through the U.S. Mail, usually postmarked from places such as Intercourse, Pennsylvania, or Middlesex, New Jersey) and eventually sentenced in to five years in Federal prison. He ended up serving only eight months in 1972, at the minimum-security Allenwood prison farm, soon to be home to Watergate co-conspirators. Ginzburg turned his experience there into a memoir, charmingly titled Castrated: My Eight Months in Prison<\/em>. Ginzburg loved the sensationalistic and suggestive, and it\u2019s no surprise that Senator Barry Goldwater successfully sued him for libel after his \u201csatirical\u201d investigative magazine Fact<\/em> described presidential candidate Goldwater as \u201cgrossly psychotic\u201d: \u201c1189 Psychiatrists Say Goldwater is Psychologically Unfit for the Presidency.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

But before all his erotica and libel, Ginzburg came up with 100 Years of Lynchings<\/em>, a cut-and-paste number that he published and distributed himself. In 60 years it\u2019s never been out of print, but as the material has been mostly in the public domain (cuttings from old newspapers) there have been several publishers and many editions and type fonts. Ginzburg\u2019s 1969 reissue put a photo of an armed, afro\u2019d black man (a model) on the cover and plugged the book as \u201cThe Shocking Record Behind Today\u2019s Black Militancy.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The news clippings are often highly exaggerated or downright implausible. There are sessions of torture, mutilation, and immolation that surely would kill anyone within a few minutes, but somehow go on for an hour or two. Sometimes there are reports from two or more papers, and it becomes clear that the scribes were competing with each other to come up with ever-more-gruesome descriptions. For example, in early 1904, a wealthy Mississippi planter named James Eastland was shot in cold blood, along with his black field-hand, by a black couple. The miscreants were eventually captured by a posse of 200 men and two packs of bloodhounds that chased them across several counties.<\/p>\n

Wire-service reports merely reported that the two were \u201cburned at the stake . . . by a mob of 1,000 persons\u201d in Doddsville, Mississippi. (\u201cNegro and Wife Burned,\u201d New York Press<\/em>, February 8, 1904.) But the down-home Vicksburg Evening Post<\/em> did the story up proud:<\/p>\n

An eye-witness to the lynching of Luther Holbert and his wife, negroes . . . today gave the Evening<\/em> Post<\/em> the following details concerning retribution exacted from the couple prior to their cremation yesterday:<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen the two Negroes were captured, they were tied to trees and . . . forced to hold out their hands while one finger at a time was chopped off. The fingers were distributed as souvenirs. The ears of the murderers were cut off . . . . Some of the mob used a large corkscrew to bore into the flesh of the man and woman. It was applied to their arms, legs and body, then pulled out, the spirals tearing out big pieces of raw, quivering flesh every time it was withdrawn.\u201d (\u201cLynched Negro and Wife Were First Mutilated,\u201d Vicksburg Evening Post,<\/em> February 8, 1904.)[2]<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cQuivering flesh\u201d is an interesting touch, a 19th century phrase from the days when newspaper wags called prostitutes \u201cnymphs of the pave,\u201d while well-dressed negresses were \u201cnotorious colored courtesans.\u201d Some people evidently believed that hunks of severed flesh would twitch and squirm. Such stories are reminiscent of the pulp-fiction and newspaper tales about the so-called New York Draft Riots of 1863, when white people supposedly caught hundreds of blacks and subjected them to diabolical tortures before hanging them from lamp poles.[3]<\/a><\/p>\n

When Ginzburg started to compile these newspaper stories in 1960, little original research was necessary. Most of the Negro-lynching reports had long since been compiled and annotated by black writers Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. DuBois, and DuBois\u2019s colleagues at the NAACP, for whom lynching stories were the main expression of civil rights activism. Wells rode to fame in the 1890s by telling America and the world that lynching of Negroes was epidemic throughout the South. She hunted down reports of alleged lynchings, and published them in a book called A<\/em> Red<\/em> Record <\/em>[4]<\/a>, meanwhile haranguing editors, politicians, and rapt audiences with her findings. People might not care to listen to a colored woman banging on about segregated railroad cars or literacy tests, but tales of hangings, burnings, horrendous torture and mutilations got their attention, and they came in droves to hear more.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

President Joe Biden looks up at Michelle Duster, who is the great-granddaughter of Ida B. Wells, before signing H.R. 55, the \u201dEmmett Till Antilynching Act\u201d during a ceremony in the Rose Garden on March 29, 2022. (Credit Image: \u00a9 Samuel Corum \u2013 Pool Via Cnp\/CNP via ZUMA Press Wire)<\/p><\/div>\n

This was like the vast crowds who would turn out for horrific lynchings, such as this one in Paris, Texas in 1893. The mangled body of a missing four-year-old girl had been found, \u201ctorn limb from limb.\u201d The only suspect was her father\u2019s Negro employee, who fled on a freight train before being apprehended:<\/p>\n

Curious and sympathizing alike, [the crowds] came on train and wagons, on horse, and on foot . . . . [T]he victim was tortured for fifty minutes by red-hot iron brands thrust against his quivering body. Commencing at the feet the brands were placed against him inch by inch until they were thrust against the face. Then, being apparently dead, kerosene was poured upon him . . . . The child\u2019s father, her brother, and two uncles then gathered about the Negro as he lay fastened to the torture platform and thrust hot irons into his quivering flesh . . . . Every groan from the fiend, every contortion of his body was cheered by the thickly packed crowd of 10,000 persons . . . . Then the eyes were burned out and irons were thrust down his throat. (From Wells, A Red Record.<\/em>)<\/p>\n

There\u2019s that \u201cquivering flesh\u201d again, and a body that lives through 50 minutes of roasting.<\/p>\n

As for DuBois, he followed Wells\u2019s lead when editing his NAACP journal, The Crisis<\/em> (1910-1934). He stuffed the magazine with year-by-year enumerations of \u201cextrajudicial killings\u201d of blacks, often reprinting gory newspaper accounts of burnings and mutilations, including the one with the corkscrews from the Vicksburg Post<\/em>. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People officially stood for justice, equality, and the Negro franchise, but those abstract causes never had the drawing power of Lynching Porn. Conveniently enough, the NAACP made passage of a Federal anti-lynching bill its premier political cause from the 1910s through the 1930s. The campaign accomplished nothing, of course (lynching was already illegal everywhere) and can\u2019t have aided the Advancement of Colored People, but it was an excellent excuse to keep publishing grisly tales.<\/p>\n

Like Wells, DuBois and his staff preferred to emphasize the most violent and repulsive accounts, preferably where one or two black individuals \u2014 people with names and histories \u2014 were set upon by a white crowd. This personalized the victims, while making the white mob a nameless, pullulating mass. The cruelty had to be heinous; average lynchings wouldn\u2019t do. As Prof. Dwight Murphey pointed out in his 1995 monograph, \u201cLynching: History and Analysis,\u201d<\/a> most lynchings were simple hangings, with no mutilations or roasting, and perhaps a quarter to a third of people lynched in the 19th and early 20th century were white. (The work was reviewed here<\/a> in 2019.) But the NAACP wouldn\u2019t bother describing those; it wanted sensationalism and outrage.<\/p>\n

Besides their dubious details, the DuBois\/NAACP version of lynching history fudged and padded the numbers. During 1917, for example, The<\/em> Crisis<\/em> claimed 222 Negroes were killed by lynchings and \u201cmob murders\u201d (white mobs during race riots). This turns out to have been 178 \u201cmob murders\u201d and only 44 cases of anything that could truly be called a lynching. Further, the \u201cmob murder\u201d numbers are guesstimates. If there was a race riot in Philadelphia or Chicago or Houston or Tulsa \u2014 and there were many in the teens and twenties \u2014 any blacks not accounted for afterwards were thrown into the \u201cmob murder\u201d totals, regardless of whether there was ever a body found. The NAACP and the Equal Justice Initiative both play fast and loose with their numbers today. The EJI claims about \u201c4,000 victims of racist terrorism<\/a>\u201d at its lynching memorial in Montgomery, Alabama, but close scrutiny of that count shows that many of the victims are nameless, and the vast majority are said to have actually died in a riot or \u201cmassacre\u201d \u2014 or \u201cmob murder\u201d as The Crisis<\/em> would say.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

The New York office of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Members included Thurgood Marshall, Ida Wells-Barnett and W E B DuBois. Date: 1933 (Credit Image: \u00a9 Mary Evans via ZUMA Press)<\/p><\/div>\n

My argument that black Civil Rights activism was never a constructive initiative for justice, equality, etc., may sound radical or unnecessarily antagonistic (Was not Doctor King sincere? Did he not say, \u201cI have a dream\u201d?<\/em>) but it is merely noticing the obvious. For most people, it constitutes a paradigm shift. We\u2019ve seen political paradigm shifts before. Up until the late 1940s, it was very difficult to attack Communism directly, because in the Stalinist era, propagandists had so successfully positioned it as a well-intentioned, if sometimes badly managed, economic system. Repression, terror, torture \u2014 these were just unfortunate byproducts of the coming Utopia, when there would be freedom and democracy for all.<\/p>\n

The person who finally cracked that nut was political philosopher James Burnham (The Managerial Revolution<\/em>, The Machiavellians<\/em>, Suicide of the West<\/em>, etc.). In his 1947 book, The Struggle for the World,<\/em> he stated the obvious: The torture and terror of Communist regimes were not growth pains or temporary discomforts; they were the essence and purpose of the regimes themselves. The insight had enormous impact on Burnham\u2019s colleague George Orwell (they both wrote for Partisan Review<\/em>), who reviewed the book just as he was settling in to write the major part of the dystopian novel that became Nineteen Eighty-Four<\/em>. Orwell had no trouble depicting the oppressive atmosphere of a Big Brother society, but as a good socialist he could not find an explanation for the cruelty and oppression. Burnham provided him with the answer. Bolshevism never was<\/em> about libert\u00e9, egalit\u00e9, fraternit\u00e9<\/em>, or freedom and democracy. No, it was none of that window-dressing. It was a self-perpetuating terror regime, as Orwell memorably put it, \u201ca boot stamping on a human face \u2014 forever.\u201d<\/p>\n

Likewise, Lynching Porn is not merely a sensationalized recounting of grievance. It is not a plea for kindness and equity. Its central purpose is to incite anger and violence, and justify more brutality, more riots and destruction, and more occasions for the never-ending cycle of Lynching Porn.<\/p>\n

Notes<\/strong><\/p>\n

[1]<\/a> None of these was an actual lynching, but they\u2019re often described that way. The Till incident (1955) was a lecture and beating that got out of hand. Arbery (2020) was shot while \u201cjogging\u201d away from a burglary scene. The heavily drugged Floyd (2020) died of heart failure while under arrest, while Willie McGee\u2019s \u201clynching\u201d (1951) was a legally ordained execution in an electric chair for the crime of rape.<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> Planter Eastland was uncle and namesake of U.S. Senator James O. Eastland, who in the 1950s and \u201960s had a decided point of view on racial matters. Senator Eastland was born nine months after his uncle was killed.<\/p>\n

[3]<\/a> (As I pointed out<\/a> a few years ago, only a handful of blacks were killed in the \u201criots,\u201d usually after shooting at crowds of white people.)<\/p>\n

[4]<\/a> A Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynchings in the United States<\/em>. Online here<\/a><\/p>\n

Originally posted at American Renaissance<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lynching Porn is not merely a sensationalized recounting of grievance. It is not a plea for kindness and equity. Its central purpose is to incite anger and violence, and justify more brutality, more riots and destruction, and more occasions for the never-ending cycle of Lynching Porn<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39262,"featured_media":258814,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-258813","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-Hidden_and_Revisionist_History"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258813","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/39262"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=258813"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258813\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":258849,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258813\/revisions\/258849"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/258814"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=258813"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=258813"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=258813"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}