American Spectator Idiocy: "Shirley Sherrod's relative was beaten to death, but he *WASN'T* lynched"

I feel like my brains are dissolving just by even reading this story:

"Plain as day, Ms. Sherrod says that Bobby Hall, a Sherrod relative, was lynched. As she puts it, describing the actions of the 1940s-era Sheriff Claude Screws: "Claude Screws lynched a black man."

This is not true. It did not happen. How do we know this?

The case, Screws vs. the U.S. Government, as she accurately says in the next two paragraphs, made it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Which, with the agreement of all nine Justices of the day -- which is to say May 7, 1945 -- stated the facts of the killing of Bobby Hall this way:

The arrest was made late at night at Hall's home on a warrant charging Hall with theft of a tire. Hall, a young negro about thirty years of age, was handcuffed and taken by car to the courthouse. As Hall alighted from the car at the courthouse square, the three petitioners began beating him with their fists and with a solid-bar blackjack about eight inches long and weighing two pounds. They claimed Hall had reached for a gun and had used insulting language as he alighted from the car. But after Hall, still handcuffed, had been knocked to the ground, they continued to beat him from fifteen to thirty minutes until he was unconscious. Hall was then dragged feet first through the courthouse yard into the jail and thrown upon the floor, dying. An ambulance was called, and Hall was removed to a hospital, where he died within the hour and without regaining consciousness. There was evidence that Screws held a grudge against Hall, and had threatened to "get" him.

In other words, the Supreme Court of the United States, with the basic facts of the case agreed to by all nine Justices in Screws vs. the U.S. Government, says not one word about Bobby Hall being lynched. Why? Because it never happened."

If you can stomach it:
http://spectator.org/archives/2010/07/26/sherrod-story-false/1

Even though "lynching" means any form of extrajudicial punishment carried out by a mob and results in the death of an innocent person, and even though this is what happened to Sherrod's relative via handcuffing him and beating him to death with fists and a blackjack; American Spectator says that this wasn't a lynching.

Good job, American Spectator, you just wrote one of the dumbest things in literary existence... EVER.

Clarence Thomas :sarcasm:

:sarcasm:

It is intended to obscure the facts of the racism of the times, and turn facts against Sherrod and make here out to be a lier...and it works for the racist consumer of their bullshit.

blaaarrrrrgh!

I can't legally say what I'm thinking.

Got that AS?

and of course his family received justice.

they draw a line amoung brutal, group, racist killings based on whether or not a rope was used.

they attempt to describe how there was a certain special horror associated with the images of klan hangings, but they obviously miss the point entirely.

personally, i think the only reason anyone could possibly imagine that there's a meaningful distinction to be made is that hangings provided for better pictures and more evocative images, where you could easily see both the dead or dying victim and the angry mob in the same shot, whereas the typical brutal beating usually leaves only an aftermath shot, usually of the victim only. much harder to get a clear shot of the beating in action.


however, there's a more direct and immediate reason to run this story. to somehow justify the headline "sherrod story false".

yup, i'd bet they fact-checked ever public statement she ever made and this was the worst they could possibly come up with.

This is what happens to idiots who can't admit they were wrong - they self-destruct.

In 1940, members of the NAACP and Tuskegee Institute held a conference to formalize a definition of the word lynching. They finally agreed that “there must be legal evidence that a person has been killed, and that he met his death illegally at the hands of a group acting under the pretext of service to justice, race, or tradition.” W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880-1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 17. Participants could not reach an agreement on the precise number of people required to constitute a "group", but several states’ antilynching statutes defined a mob as three or more participants. While most modern Americans automatically associate lynching with hanging, collective murder took a wide variety of forms, including burnings, shootings, drownings, dynamite explosions of homes, etc. By every contemporary and current definition, it was a lynching.