An excerpt from the NY Times -
How Northern Newspapers Covered Lynchings
By Charles Seguin
From the late 1800s well into the 20th century, thousands of people, mostly black and poor, were murdered by lynch mobs that sometimes burned their victims alive, castrated them or cut their bodies up into little pieces that were passed around as souvenirs.
Southern newspapers justified these horrors by calling lynching victims “fiends,” “brutes” or “ravishers,” leaving their guilt unquestioned. Lurid details of supposed rapes of white women by black men, often entirely fabricated, were recounted in Southern papers to justify, or even to incite, lynchings.
In a landmark move, The Montgomery Advertiser recently apologized for its role in justifying and promoting lynching. But many Northern papers were just as complicit.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/11/opinion/northern-newspapers-lynchings.html?smprod=nytcore-ipad&smid=nytcore-ipad-share
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