Black men being accused of raping white girls was often the excuse for lynchings, but what if the reverse happened? Exactly how bad would the reaction get?
1920's US South ----- Black Community Lynches White Rapists.
- Thread starter Peg Leg Pom
- Start date
RamscoopRaider
Donor
Something like the Tulsa riots but bigger, probably the National Guard gets involved in wrecking the community in question and lynching every male old enough to shave and quite a few others. Use of machine guns and attacking aircraft almost certain, can't rule out use of artillery
Heavy weapons would draw entirely too much heat on how the local good old boys are slaughtering American citizens. The last thing the South wants is to make this a national political issue in the North.
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RamscoopRaider
Donor
Aircraft dropped bombs and machine guns were historically used in both the Tulsa Race Riots and the Battle of Blair Mountain, both contemporaneous events. Besides they have justification, the "@#$^ @@#$^&#" are killing white folks and launching an uprising, the historical justification for the Tulsa Race Riots, actual artillery is not that much of an escalation from what actually happened OTL, while the cause, white folks getting lynched by blacks is something more provocative to southern racists than anything OTL
Well the African American community would be outnumbered roughly 8:1 (depending on the state) the White Community had ALL the police, pretty much all the state legislators, and ALL the Governors thus the National Guard. The African American community would be almost, if not entirely, residing in one readily identifiable part of town.
be about as bad as you can imagine, at least until the U.S. Army got there.
As others have said already, it would be bad and depending on who's calling the shots in the Oval Office, the government response could be even worse. The violence would certainly galvanize both whites and the African-American community, and both the UNIA-ACL and the fledgling Nation of Islam would be more amenable to more militant actions in the defense of the African-American community. Race relations would be absolutely fucked for a long time forward, even worse than they were in OTL.
RamscoopRaider
Donor
Not very if at all, see Tulsa, and this time the racists have a better argument
Tulsa proved pretty damned clearly that the racists didn't need a good argument, other than making sure the black people didn't have any wealth of their own.
Assuming the U.S. Army wasn't part of the problem. 50/50 on that one at best.
DC is not likely to let the South rise like that. There were a few people in Congress who could remember the recent unpleasantness.
Lynching--as opposed to individual acts of violence-- was generally impossible without a sympathetic or at least apathetic local/state government. Needless to say, blacks would not get that.
There were all black towns. Would it be all that surprising if knowing they had sod all chance of obtaining justice such a community took the law into its own hands?
The all-black towns were in white-governed counties and states.
Even if a mob could gather and kill someone before county and state law enforcement could get there, it would suffer terrible retaliation (both legal and extra-legal) from the authorities afterwards.
The point about white lynchers is that they knew that in all probability they could get away with it. Black lynchers couldn't.
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