@sun Interesting, there's a map now. I wonder if this is ongoing research. I have his book he published around 2000, and he's not full of shit on this.
@feld his book might be good but the map is shit. I looked at some other places and they give actual anecdotal claims, but I clicked on several towns I've actually been to and there wasn't any evidence at all cited despite being listed as "possible".
@feld that is a good metric, the map doesn't actually provide good census data for any of the cities I've looked up. This looks like a shitty undergrad project or something.
@sun@leyonhjelm the Janesville, WI one on this site says they had ONE black local helping to run an anti-black operation which is... weird. but okay. lol
> In a set of interviews provided at the University of Wisconsin historical interviews, William ‘Blue’ Jenkins talks about his investigation of union discrimination in Chevrolet plant at Janesville, “found Janesville had a “ring” made up of newspaper, church, business people and the city’s one Black resident; they worked to keep Blacks out of the city.”
TL;DR after Reconstruction we had blacks living, working, and owning property in almost every zip code in the country. Loewell goes into detail on this in the book.
And then almost simultaneously country-wide the blacks were violently evicted, their properties stolen, etc. They were blamed for economic distress because obviously their existence in the community was taking away from the white residents :rolleyes: so that was used as justification to kick them out, then they used the local police to keep them out.
Some communities went as far as to organize to be incorporated so they could apply for federal funding for a Sheriff which they used to enforce keeping blacks out after sundown.
And many town/city ordinances that followed were carefully done to not be officially on the books. It was pretty dirty. So much of it only existed in living memory that has now been lost because the people are dead, but he was able to get elderly people who worked for these municipalities to go on the record about what the local laws and ordinances were and how they enforced them
@feld there used to be a lot of black people in iowa and it's been said that but the black people all just got old and their kids moved out of iowa lol
Typically these kinds of investigations discount every possible explanation that isn't about skin color, inb4 objections to my dismissive attitude towards the listed source, the one black resident working against the people being excluded suggests even he'd had enough of the bullshit of those he was helping keep out.
@feld The only harassment that ever happened in my town was one guy married a Jewish woman and they put a star of david in their yard over the holidays and they started getting threatening phone calls. which is crazy because he was a cop lol
@sun I'm pretty sure my little hometown was a Sundown town. In the 90s we had a few blacks move in and one latino family, they were run out of town. Didn't last more than a few weeks due to harassment and threats. Other than that there was never a non-white person in my community unless they were living and working at one of the farms.
@leyonhjelm@feld oen town I lived in only ever lynched one person, and they were white. the city got sick of the asshole constantly committing crime and hurting people so one day they all got together and tied him to a log and threw him in the river.
That is what happens when the law isn't protecting people. I know of one town where there is "nigger hill" where alledgedly lynchings used to occur (not here) and it has all the earmarks of a teenage legend that gets passed down in the high school population but no actual evidence that it's occurred there other than that hearsay. The more time passes, the more I suspect lynchings not involving the Klan specifically were a compensation for local law enforcement not curbing actual crime.
@sun@leyonhjelm@feld based. reminds me of that one town that killed a guy creeping on everyone's daughters and the entire population refused to tell police who did it
If you really believe their story that he was "constantly committing crime and hurting people", you'd think he could have been arrested... but to me it sounds like a lie they told themselves to justify it.
@feld@leyonhjelm if you involve race I can believe a whole town getting together to just murder someone but if it's another white person I need some kind of explanation so I believe it. I was told he kept getting away with "hurting" women.
@feld@leyonhjelm I won't generalize it, it's just compelling since it was the only time it ever happened there. it could have been exceptional circumstances or something got out of control.
@sun@leyonhjelm take your strong distrust for the government and apply it to all the leaders of your local community. Everyone you grew up with that you were expected to trust. There's no guarantee these people are honest; it's more likely they're not being straight with you about things like this.
@leyonhjelm@feld well my personal experience, I have witnessed people around me treat black misbehavior far far harshly compared to equivalent white misbehavior so I accept it's a thing that happens.
The documented cases are relatively few overall. I suspect the more important ones are the ones we can never analyze that have no records at all. If it's just about racial hatred, that's the ones that would be most telling. You often hear about "black kid mouthed off and got dragged to a tree" as an example but I've only heard of that as one specific documented case that gets treated as if it were an everyday occurrence. And as if that were the whole story. If there's one thing we see from BLM's martyrs list, it's that living in an age of unprecedented information access, we usually learn that "he was a good boy" is a total lie.