This is one of those cases that makes me wish that a fiery crack would just open up in the ground under these folks and take them all straight to Hell.
The newspapers and TV news outlets in the area have carried coverage of this, but in conversations with friends in Seattle and Los Angeles, I discovered that they had never heard of it.
What the journalists fear is a hardening of white opinion on the American race question. Liberal white Southerners in particular remember the history of this region and what can happen if white folks get riled up enough.
Had this incident happened as recently at the 1920s, the fathers of the town would have put on their sheets and pointy hats and marched down to the county jail by torchlight. The police chief would have been a member of the Klan, or he would have known not to challenge the crowd's anger. Either way, the two miscreants would have been dragged down to an old live oak or bridge, and they would have been lynched. Once dead, their bodies would have been set on fire.
With that job finished, the fathers of the town would have surrounded the Brunswick ghetto, sealed it off and burned it to the ground in an action reminiscent of Tulsa (1921) or Rosewood, Florida (1923). The inhabitants would have been killed or scattered to the winds.
Today the police chief would mobilize a collection of state and federal authorities who would prevent anything like this from happening, to include the use of troops. Were it to happen, it would set off racial insurrections in most of the country's major cities.
There is ancestral memory at work here, which is why the Mainstream Media is trying to tamp this one down.