From about the 1890s on, in order to make the new system of segregation, or Jim
Crow, work it was necessary to cow people and so lynching, which had been not
uncommon in the South and ofttimes in equal opportunity pursuit -- whites were
lynched as well -- but by the 1890s it is almost exclusively race coded, color
coded, and it escalates as part of the glue of the new system of repression
under segregation. George White introduced the first federal anti-lynching
legislation in 1900 in response to the rise in lynching that would peak about
1910. White thinks that the government has a role to play, that the civil
rights of citizens under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments should be
protected and it's appropriate that the government, therefore, do so and this
legislation he introduced was to effectuate that.
It received three votes. By that time, the consensus was that even for those
who were descendants of abolitionists in the North, the consensus was "This is
such a messy problem that we should let the South handle the problem and we
should do nothing to destabilize this arrangement." It was not altogether
because of racism vis-a-vis the African American, because at that very moment
in 1900 we have this in migration of immigrants, new immigrants, not the nordic
immigrants of yore, but from southern Europe, from Russia and they presented a
problem to the native American establishment quite analogous to the African
American problem, as it was perceived, presented to the plantocracy of the New
South.
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