My grandpa, now a very old man says he remembers reading about lynchings in the newspaper. He said that he was about 10 living in California and the newspaper articles were just a few paragraphs. He said he understood that someone was hanged, but he just didn’t understand how or why it happened. He said that he thought the South was a foreign country and bad things happened to some people there.
Lynchings don't necessarily have anything to do with race.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wesley_Everest
Regards,