I suspect your friend is nuts, if he’s referring to lynchings. Outside Texas, the SW and CA, there just weren’t many Mexicans around until recent decades. OTOH, he might be right for CA and the SW, cause back in the day there were darn few blacks around the lynch.
Lynchings, BTW, while a sad episode in American history, have been grossly exaggerated.
Less than 5000 people total were lynched since 1882. None for 60 years. If I remember right, about 2/3 of them were black, the rest being lumped together in the stats as white.
It is probable most of those who were lynched were guilty of serious crimes, and quite a few probably would have been executed if they been given a fair trial.
But 5000 people in a country of this size over 140 years just isn’t that many.
Not trying to be an apologist for lynching, just to put it into perspective.
That’s about how I read it.
It has a context and perspective in that maybe in CA or the SW,more Mexicans were hung than blacks but, how does one quantify that?
Here is an excellent pictorial set of graphs, which demonstrate there was no real count for Hispanic or Latinos until the 1970’s.
http://uselectionatlas.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=169073.0
Blacks don’t come en masse to California until 1940 when, for instance, in Los Angeles they number 63,000.
By 1970 their population is around 700,000 in the state.
But, how many latino/Mexicans were living in California between 1848 and 1948?
Certainly more than there were blacks.