My grandfather (a permanent Bama resident)...commented once...that in his 101 odd years...in the local county that he lived in (from 1888 to 1989)...he’d seen or heard of two total lynchings. Once involved some white “pretender” minister who had taken a number of local married women for pleasures...the other involved some black who had been accused of raping a local white woman. Neither made the local paper...and he doubted that the sheriff in the county knew of either event occurring.
My father, who worked at the DuPont TNT plant in Alabama during WWII, used to tell of an incident which caused him to broaden his view on the topic.
It seems a local white man (known in his community as something of a hot head) went over to the wrong side of town on a Saturday night, it was believed in search of some libidinous variety. He accosted the wrong woman, one whose affections were NOT negotiable. Rejected, he began to raise a fuss. The local African-American male population, already offended that he had insulted a respectable lady in their community, beat him severely, tied him to the back of a pick-up truck, and dragged him back to the “line” separating the white form the black part of town. He did not survive this rough handling.
What surprized my Dad, as he told it, was that the rural, Southran, white men that he worked with did not seem to be the least upset at the incident. These were fellows whose grandfathers had fought for the Confederacy, and gone night-riding with the KKK during Reconstruction. Although unabashedly patriotic, they were also unreconstructed advocates of the Lost Cause. Surely, he thought, the case of a White man lynched by Blacks ought to violate their sense of the Right and Proper. He asked them why they were not angry. “The SOB got what was comin’ to him,” was their considered opinion. “He had no business in ‘Darktown’ in the first place, nor rilin’ up the locals by messin’ with their women. ‘course it was too bad he died, but he was askin’ for trouble, and it found him.”
Nothing is ever as simple as it seems .