I think that's kind of the point of the thread, no? OP's asking how severe the response would be and how the various levels of the government would react to what would basically become the Red Summer, but ten times worse.
1920's US South ----- Black Community Lynches White Rapists.
- Thread starter Peg Leg Pom
- Start date
It'd be really fucking bad, a lot of folk were looking for excuses to assault the local African American population. This would be it.
Fucking grim is the answer but I dont really see that happening. A lot of African American's knew how vulnerable they were and how outnumbered they were. Mob justice wasn't an option, that sat with the White Majority. Most minorities within an environment as virulently hostile as the American South know their survival sadly depends keep their heads down. Violent solutions simply weren't an option to attain justice.
Fucking grim is the answer but I dont really see that happening. A lot of African American's knew how vulnerable they were and how outnumbered they were. Mob justice wasn't an option, that sat with the White Majority. Most minorities within an environment as virulently hostile as the American South know their survival sadly depends keep their heads down. Violent solutions simply weren't an option to attain justice.
The point is that a recognition of how terrible the response would be is one reason black lynchings of whites were so unlikely to happen. Whites in a lynch mob could count on all-white juries acquitting them, if worst came to worst and they actually stood trial. Obviously black lynchers had no such hope (and anyway legal trials would be the least of their worries).
The POD here seems to assume that black people in the South would be either suicidal or oblivious to the realities of power in the South--neither of which is very likely.
You mean successful lynchings where the participants get away with it.
Theoretically you can get a lynching any place where one group decisively outnumbers/outpowers the other. Theoretically you could get lynchings of whites in black majority areas of cities.
It's just most Black Americans were smart enough to realize that they wouldn't get away with it and would recieve massive retaliation in return.
In the 1920s they used automatic weapons on Black civilians when violent protests against segregation erupted. They did not use aircraft or artillery though
Pretty much yeah. That's pretty much the same reason that Dr. King later went with peaceful non violent methods. Beyond any moral superiority it was really the only available option. Pretty basic rule of a fight is to not fight it the way you're opponents want to fight. White America massively outgunned, out manned (in terms of population numbers 13 percent of the US was black and at the time the overwhelming majority would be considered white today), and out monied black America.
At least in the 60's the US government also had one of the two strongest security apparatus/ militaries on the planet. It's just not an environment where something like guerrilla warfare is going to succeed in. Guerrilla warfare also generally succeeds when they have a powerful patron funneling money, guns, and advisors in to help (such as the Soviets in Vietnam or the US in the Soviet Afghan War). In the 20's and in the 60's they're not going to find that anywhere.
Frankly there were much better odds for Indian revolutionaries against the Raj (instead of say Gandhi's non violent tactics) then there would be for theoretical black revolutionaries in the US of either the 20's or the 60's.
Automatic weapons were pretty much completly legal at the time. Thompson offered brand new Tommy Guns delivered straight to your door for twenty bucks.
You could relatively easily purchases WW1 surplus machine guns of a wide variety legally and for penny on the dollar.
And yet they were still rare at the time. Thompson struggled for years to get the very most minimal of sales.
Difference in culture I guess. If SMG's were available for the 2020 equivalent of 1920's 20 bucks they'd be sold in the millions within months. Yet they had only a few thousand sales in the entire 1920's.
They did use some machine guns they also used a few BARs and a heavy machine gun.
You don't seem to get that half the point of lynching was its openness!
https://books.google.com/books?id=ieixAAAAQBAJ&pg=PA239
Very ugly. Expect racist politicians to spread conspiracy theories that the black lynchers framed the white rapists and use that as an excuse to crack down, thus causing worse race riots. Hopefully one of Harding's virtues as a president, that being his support of civil rights, has him at least try to settle things out and punish the offending parties