'Bout Fuckin' Time, Bubba

Lynching is a premeditated extrajudicial killing by a group. It is most often used to characterize informal public executions by a mob in order to punish an alleged transgressor, or to intimidate a group. It can also be an extreme form of informal group social control, and it is often conducted with the display of a public spectacle for maximum intimidation.

Imagine living in a country where there's no federal law making it illegal to lynch somebody. 

Where a "States' Rights" argument holds sway and blocks all efforts to codify what should be a no-brainer: "We don't subscribe to mob rule here."

Welcome to USAmerica Inc - before last year anyway.

Smithsonian:

In a legislative victory 100 years in the making, the Senate unanimously approved a bill on Wednesday that declares lynching a federal crime in the United States.

The Justice for Victims of Lynching Act was a bipartisan effort introduced earlier this year by three African-American Senators: California Democratic Senator Kamala Harris, New Jersey Democratic Senator Cory Booker and South Carolina Republican Senator Tim Scott. The bill, according to CNN’s Eli Watkins, deems lynching—or mob killings that take place without legal authority—as “the ultimate expression of racism in the United States,” and adds lynching to the list of federal hate crimes.

Though the practice existed during the era of slavery in the United States, lynchings proliferated in the wake of the Civil War, when African-Americans began to establish businesses, build towns and even run for public office. “Many whites … felt threatened by this rise in black prominence,” according to PBS. In turn, the article reports, "most victims of lynching were political activists, labor organizers or black men and women who violated white expectations of black deference, and were deemed 'uppity' or 'insolent.'"

Lynchings were largely—though not exclusively—a Southern phenomenon. Between 1877 and 1950, there were 4,075 lynchings of African-Americans in 12 Southern States, according to the Equal Justice Initiative. The new bill states that 99 percent “of all perpetrators of lynching escaped from punishment by state or local officials.”

Loudoun Times-Mirror:

Years before lynching was outlawed in Virginia, a black teenager in Loudoun County was a target of the gruesome act for allegedly scaring a white, teenaged girl.

But before Orion Anderson's day in court, researchers say a small group broke into his jail cell, dragged him to the Leesburg freight depot in southeast Leesburg, hanged him and and shot him.

This Wednesday, in the same area where Anderson was lynched, the first of three markers remembering those lynched will be memorialized. Community members and elected officials will join the Loudoun County NAACP, Loudoun Freedom Center and NOVA Parks to honor Anderson in the first of a series called Loudoun Remembrance and Reconciliation.

Back in 1918, Missouri Republican Leonidas C. Dyer first introduced a bill that would make lynching a federal crime. According to the BBC, the bill passed the House but did not to make it through the Senate. Over the next century, more than 200 anti-lynching bills were introduced to Congress, all of which failed. Filibusters were used three times to block the legislation.

“Excerpts from the Congressional Record show some senators argued that such laws would interfere with states’ rights,” Avis Thomas-Lester of the Washington Post reported in 2005, the same year that the Senate passed a resolution apologizing for its failure to enact anti-lynching legislation. “Others, however, delivered impassioned speeches about how lynching helped control what they characterized as a threat to white women and also served to keep the races separate.”
- and -

Earlier this year, the Virginia General Assembly passed a resolution for the commonwealth to acknowledge “with profound regret” the existence and acceptance of lynching. The resolution was introduced by Democratic Sen. Jennifer L. McClellan from Richmond and co-patroned by local Sen. Jennifer Boysko (D-33rd). Democratic Del. Delores McQuinn (D-70th) introduced a similar resolution in the House.
"Earlier this year..."!?!

And BTW, why the fuck is it that:

1) it's always the Dems who're taking this up

...and...

2) what's wrong with Repubs that they resist the simple impulse to act like human fucking beings?

Like the man said - I don't know that you're a racist asshole, but it's plain to see that there are racist assholes among us, who self-identify as racist assholes - and they believe you to be a racist asshole just like them.

And BTW #2: They all knew about it. There were no "good southerners" any more than there were "good Germans" who weren't aware of what was going on, and who were just as shocked as anyone else to find out "there were bad things being done on our behalf that besmirched our good name and went against our Christian faith and blah blah fucking blah."

Bullshit.