Lynching--Criminal justice, administration of
Note, first, that there is no “xx” from homicide although that head is provided with references variously from and to assassination, death by wrongful act, murder, poisoning, suicide, offences against the person, and violent deaths. Second, there is no “xx” from murder despite the fact that this form, like homicide, is accorded many of the same named referents, plus strangling. Third, no connection is made between lynching and terrorism, nor between the act itself and its historically well known victims: Black people. And fourth, the appearance of “Criminal Justice, administration” as the sole “xx” lends the term, as well as the practice it denotes, a certain dignity, if not if not legitimacy. Coming to fundamentals, is lynching somehow less “homicidal” or “murderous” than “strangling” or “poisoning”? Is it not an “offense against the person” usually resulting in a “violent death”? Are these qualities of lynching particularly diminished because the lynched over the past century, have been largely Black and the lynchers White.
Outlining the historic role of lynching in America, van den Berghe states the practice:Existed before the Civil War but it was overwhelmingly an act of whites against whites and attempting to control frontier lawlessness where legal machinery was either absent or ineffective. After the Civil War, lynching assumed a different character. It became a racial phenomenon: most victims were Negroes and most criminals were whites; it was no longer a device to control banditry in an anarchistic frontier, but rather a terrorist technique to maintain white supremacy and settled communities with an established legal order.
Perhaps an LC savants can elucidate on how racist murder committed by white criminal gangs qualifies as “Administration of criminal justice” all the more so when the “punished” victims “may in fact be known to be innocent of any crime” and in any event never enjoy due process.
Remedies:
(a) eliminate “Criminal justice, administration” as an “xx”
(b) install as “xx's” under lynching:
Homicide
Murder
Offenses against the person
Terrorism
Violent deaths
(c) create a new sub head under Afro-Americans (formally Negroes):-- Persecutions, making cross references from and to lynching.
Sanford Berman, Prejudices and Antipathies, 1971, p. 59.
