Message 30/103
Date: 05-Apr-03 @ 09:40 AM -
RE: Ironic
influx: try being black in the south...
What's your history? Brought here as a slave.. Forced to work until you died, No right to stay with your family, if you were a young woman you could expect to be regularly raped by the white master, his sons or his staff. If you stepped out of line you would be whipped or beaten, maybe have your ankles broken, your face disfigured or simply killed.
After emancipation the whites in the south adopted new tactics. In 1865 and 1866, about 5,000 Southern blacks were murdered. No whites were convicted of doing anything wrong.
The Ku Klux Klan also attempted to keep blacks from voting through an increased use of threats, beatings, and killings. More than 3,000 blacks were lynched during the late 1800's, and the Klan and members of similar groups lynched hundreds more throughout the South during the early 1900's.
There was a decline in lynching during the First World War but more than seventy blacks were murdered in this way in the year after the war ended. Ten black soldiers, several still in their army uniforms, were amongst those lynched. Between 1919 and 1922, a further 239 blacks were lynched by white mobs and many more were killed by individual acts of violence and unrecorded lynchings. In none of these cases was a white person punished for these crimes.
Dr. Arthur Raper was commissioned in 1930 to produce a report on lynching. He discovered that "3,724 people were lynched in the United States from 1889 through to 1930. Over four-fifths of these were Negroes, less than one-sixth of whom were accused of rape. Practically all of the lynchers were native whites.
The fact that a number of the victims were tortured, mutilated, dragged, or burned suggests the presence of sadistic tendencies among the lynchers. Of the tens of thousands of lynchers and onlookers, only 49 were indicted and only 4 have been sentenced."
Henry Hayes was executed on 6th June, 1997. It was the first time a white man had been executed for a crime against an African American since 1913!!!!!
Now, you tell me, in the last 100 years, how many
a) white people were executed for killing black people?
b) black people were killed by white people?
If you are an american and you don't have a clue, you should be ashamed.. go research.
Here's something to get you started on your journey of discovery:
'between 1930 and 1996, more than half of all those executed have been African-Americans. When the crime (or accusation) is rape, the death penalty has almost always been exclusively reserved for blacks. Of the 453 men executed for rape since 1930, 405 have been black. Nearly all of them were executed in the South. They were arrested and convicted on the flimsiest evidence, usually no more than the word of a white woman. At the same time, not one white man received the death penalty for raping a black woman. There is no official record in any Southern state of a black man ever being executed for raping a black woman. The victims of all but 44 of the blacks executed in the South from 1930 through 1984 were white. Not much has changed over the years. A black is still eleven times more likely to get the death penalty then a white when the victim is white. At present nearly half of those currently sitting on the nation's death rows are black. And that number has remained steady for three decades. The only real change in the top heavy racial make-up of death row prisoners is the jump in the number of Latinos awaiting execution. In Texas and California, the runaway leaders in the number of prisoners on death row, a significant number of the condemned are Latinos. A recent report from the Leadership Council on Civil Rights revealed that Latinos have outstripped blacks as the fastest growing imprisoned group in America. The same glaring racial bias that insures many black men wind up on death row also ensnares Latinos.'
Sounds like a living hell to me...
(And lets not mention the experience of the Native Americans)