A white lynch mob assembled to exult in showing its gleeful indifference to a Black person’s pain and the loss of a Black person’s life. That was to convey the sheer impunity of white supremacy. That white people have the power to rip away a Black person’s life for ANY reason.

Donald Trump and his base had rallies during a viral pandemic, in purposefully unsafe conditions, that has killed over 350,000+ Americans. They shun wearing masks, they shun social distancing, they shun media focus on COVID-19. That too is to celebrate gleeful indifference.

Lamenting “I don’t understand why Donald Trump’s base hasn’t turned on him!” when he does something cruel is akin to witnessing a lynch mob and saying “I don’t understand why that act of cruelty isn’t disgusting the mob!”

CRUELTY IS WHAT THEY’VE COME TO SEE.

And to be clear, I’m not offering a new observation. Adam Serwer told us all “The Cruelty is the Point” two years ago. He invoked the temperament of the white lynch mob to make his case. And yet, white people still go “I don’t understand why Trump’s base won’t turn on him!"

Let me re-emphasize why this is happening: it’s because you do not want to deeply interrogate the history of how white people have treated Black people in the US. If you have read about the temperament of the white lynch mob, nothing about Trump’s base would surprise you.

So, in this thread, you’re going to read about lynching. And if you don't think that's key to understanding Donald Trump's base, you're delusional.

I am going to share documented cases of lynching and what exactly transpired according to the press. The cases I share are a mere fraction of THIS book. Some are notable enough that they have wiki pages today. Some are not. I think sharing both is important.

I’ll mainly focus on cases of spectacle lynching, but it’s important to note that cases of spectacle lynching are a subset of what defines a lynching, which itself is a subset of a history of violence against Black people in the United States. http://lynching.csde.washington.edu/#/about 

The chief supposition of this thread: I believe that white people who have ever been bewildered by Donald Trump’s base have simply not read enough about a history of lynching in the United States. In the temperament of the white lynch mob, you will see something familiar.

At this point, I must issue the following CONTENT WARNING for verbal accountings of extreme acts of violence committed against Black people. Issuing also a TRIGGER WARNING as some of these accounts will have racial slurs and verbal anti-Black sentiment.

The lynching of Sam Hose (aka Sam Holt) as reported by the Springfield (Massachusetts) Weekly Republican on April 28, 1899. He was eviscerated, immolated, and his body parts were collected and sold as souvenirs. He cried for mercy. He was given none.

This lynching profoundly affected W.E.B. Du Bois. He thought knowledge would be enough to fight violent white supremacy. When he heard that Sam Hose’s fingers and toes were on exhibit in a grocery store, he swiftly abandoned that notion. https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/civil-rights-act/multimedia/w-e-b-du-bois.html

Left near where Sam Hose was killed was this placard: “We must protect our Southern Women.” This was the common pretext for a lynching: that Black men just can’t help themselves around white women. Obviously spurious today, but it was not viewed that way at the time.

Years before this lynching, Ida B. Wells observed that lynching wasn’t to protect white women, but rather to control their sexuality. White men could have relations with any woman they wanted, whereas Black men were lynched for relations with white women.

The pretext lynchers offered was that lynching was to defend the honor of white women. But the function of a lynching in reality was to reinforce a white supremacist patriarchal system, which Ida B. Wells’s investigations were important in establishing.

She would also go on to cover the lynching of Sam Hose in her “Lynch Law in Georgia.” She noted that a newspaper was incredibly complicit in normalizing the conditions for a lynching. They repeatedly predicted a lynching and offered a reward for Sam’s capture.

Wells hired a Chicago detective to do a thorough investigation into the lynching of Hose. The detective investigated the original claim that Sam murdered his employer. He concluded that Sam acted in self-defense. And the charge that Sam assaulted his employer’s wife was false.

We continue... with The lynching of Richard Coleman as reported by the New York World on December 7, 1899. A man calmly threw cayenne pepper into Coleman’s eyes and held his eyelids shut as he burned alive. Note: cruelty beget more cruelty. It was mercy that was dissuaded.

Exulting in white lawlessness is why Donald Trump’s crimes aren’t dealbreakers. To the very contrary, they are seen as proof of his impunity. White supremacy has a long history of white people being done caring about the law. You’re living through such a time.

The lynching of Henry Askew and Ed Russ as reported by the New York Times on June 11, 1900. Evidence that they were guilty was severely lacking. They were lynched regardless. Because “justice” for the lynch mob was a Black life extinguished.

The lynching of Bailie Crutchfield as reported by the New York Tribune on March 17, 1901. A mob was going to lynch a Black man accused of theft, but he managed to flee the mob. So, they decided to just lynch his sister instead.

The lynching of Dudley Morgan as reported by the Chicago Record-Herald on May 23, 1902. A crowd of 5000 watched him get tortured to death. The temperament of the mob: may his death be a slow one. The white men who captured Morgan were treated like rock stars.

A spectacle lynching is about white people exulting in demonstrating stunning unfairness and displaying astonishing disregard for a human life to the point that it is a thrilling sight. It was about feeling as symbolically above Black people as possible.

It is no coincidence that we are living through an era marked by mass death and one political base has reacted to this by celebrating being stunningly unfair and displaying such astonishing disregard for human life. This is the temperament of white supremacy.

The lynching of Luther Holbert and his wife as reported by the Vicksburg (Mississippi) Evening Post on February 8, 1904. Two Black victims watched as their body parts were cut away and distributed as souvenirs by the mob. They were tortured with corkscrews. Then lit on fire.

The lynching of Jesse Washington as reported by the New York World on May 16, 1916. Following a guilty verdict, he was taken by a mob which grew to 15,000 spectators. He was set on fire, and his body was displayed as a warning to Black people.

He was actually seventeen, not eighteen as stated in the original article. And the attendance of 15,000 spectators is an estimate that constituted half of the city of Waco, Texas at the time. https://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/01/us/fresh-outrage-in-waco-at-grisly-lynching-of-1916.html

The lynching of Jim McIlherron as reported by the Chattanooga Times on February 18, 1918. The terrible power that the lynch mob conferred to white people was anonymity. They assembled to form something more powerful than any individual, before committing their terrible deeds.

White people traveled fifty miles to see this lynching. Cases of lynching were treated like carnivals and white people traveled miles to bear witness. From the official NAACP investigation into Jim McIlherron’s lynching.

Again, cruelty committed by mob participants was celebrated because each act of cruelty was perceived as permission to commit more intense cruelty. The lynch mob’s cruelty was positively reinforcing with seemingly no conceivable limit.

It would be a mistake to approach the lynch mob as an assembled body of people who want to get away with some cruelty, but they can conceive of limits. The point of a lynching was to celebrate no limits to what white people can do to Black people.

That’s precisely how you need to view Donald Trump’s base: they are convinced there are no limits to what they can do to their perceived political enemies. That’s their priority during a viral pandemic as it was before a viral pandemic. Their priorities haven’t changed.

American fascism bestows on white people the same power as the white lynch mob: an opportunity to be part of something greater than yourself that is seemingly incapable of experiencing consequences.

When Donald Trump has a scandal, their impulse is to support him so that he does not experience consequences. When Donald Trump transgresses, they revel in his power to transgress without experiencing consequences. Like the lynch mob, that is THE power they want for themselves.

The prelude to the lynching of Henry Lowery (aka Henry Lowry here) as reported by the Memphis News-Scimitar on January 26, 1921. This newspaper talks about the “serenity of the party’s journey” …by a white mob that took a Black man from law enforcement to lynch him.

Surprisingly, before the lynching, Lowery had requests for mercy that were granted. But when the lynching was underway, no mercy was given. He tried to end his suffering early, but the mob made sure that he would die a slow death. https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/entries/henry-lowery-7064/

The lynching of Fred Rouse as reported by the Fort Worth Telegram on December 12, 1921. Before he was hanged, he was hospitalized after being beaten following a violent confrontation with strikers and a subsequent mob beating that left him nearly dead.

A small group of young white men visited the hospital and demanded Rouse be turned over to them. A night nurse tried to dissuade them, but they made clear they were going to take Rouse regardless. Reflect on what you would do if you were in her shoes.

Because here is what the night nurse did: she yielded and led them to Rouse. They almost grabbed the “wrong” Black man, but they took Rouse from the hospital and hanged him at the site of a previous lynching. “Wrong” is in quotes because every lynching was wrong.

I’m flashing forward to 1934. While this case of lynching was also in “100 Years of Lynching”, I wanted an extremely detailed accounting of what transpired. So I purchased a book exclusively about the lynching of Claude Neal. I’ll be sharing details from this book instead.

This is the cultural backdrop of Jackson County in the 1930s: as dire as race-relations can be. Black people who lived here felt they had no true allies among white people, and felt like they could not reach out to major civil rights organizations for support.

Claude Neal was arrested as a suspect in the murder of Lola Cannidy, a 19-year-old white woman who may also have been raped. This happened near the city of Marianna, Florida in Jackson County.

Despite a lack of direct evidence implicating Neal in the murder, lynch mobs assembled immediately upon learning of his arrest. They demanded that the Jackson County Sheriff tell them in which jail Neal was being held.

Mobs searched for Neal in a 75-mile radius around Marianna. In Chipley County, they threatened to dynamite the jail if the Black suspects weren’t turned over. Yes, plural. These mobs were looking for Neal’s mother and aunt too, as they suspected their involvement.

The sheriff at Chipley County didn’t think his jail could withstand an assault from a lynch mob, so he hid Claude Neal’s mother and aunt at the bottom of his automobile while the armed mob screamed, in tears, for the Black suspects to be turned over to them.

One night, three cars full of white lynchers pulled up to the jail in Brewton. Sheriff Byrne of Escambia County, AL tried to assure them that Neal wasn’t there (he was). Byrne’s attempts to placate them seemingly worked. He pursued them to make sure they actually departed…

Unfortunately, the cars that departed were a decoy. And it worked. Another automobile convoy of lynchers stormed the Brewton jail, threatened the jailer, and managed to find Neal. They took him back to Jackson County where Lola Cannidy’s father was to begin the lynching.

The scene at the Cannidy farmstead was festive. There were white men, women, and children. The men talked loudly, laughed loudly, and some spoke of wanting some of Neal’s body parts as souvenirs. The people who detained Neal thought the situation would spiral out of control.

Leading up to the Cannidy farmstead, there were cars on both sides of the road for a mile. One Marianna newspaper estimated there were three to five thousand white people in attendance.

Ideally, the lynching would have been carried out with Lola Cannidy’s father dealing the first blow to Neal. That is not what happened. Every time the mob leadership (called “The committee”) tried to move the family to the spot where Lola died, the mob would get overly excited.

The decision was ultimately made to kill Neal near where he was being held near the Chattahoochee River. He was tortured for two hours before being lynched. During that torture, he was castrated and fed his own testicles. The mob forced Neal to say he liked the taste.

If this was utterly disgusting to read, then you know how utterly disgusting white supremacy is in practice. And the horror did not stop with this.

After Neal was killed, they tied his body to a car and brought it to the Cannidy farmstead. After people teared at Neal’s body with knives, Lola Cannidy’s father shot Neal’s forehead in rage. He was angry with the lynchers for not giving him the first crack at Neal as promised.

After that, members of the larger mob had their way with Neal’s body. They kicked his body. They drove cars over his body. They let children stab his body with sharpened sticks. But their bloodlust did not stop with Neal’s body. They burned shacks owned by nearby Black people.

Eventually the lynch mob hung Neal’s body, nude, near a courthouse. There is no more flagrant display of contempt for the law than this. They stripped a Black man of everything—his well-being, his life, his clothes—and displayed the result near a court of law.

Owning Claude Neal’s body parts conferred status for white people in Jackson County. Obviously completely insane, but it’s worth noting this is not far removed from what this country was founded upon: white people owning Black PEOPLE as a display of social status.

I need to stress something about the lynching of Claude Neal that is meant to enhance a sense of our proximity to the past. As much as white people want to enhance their sense of distance from the past.

This happened only 86 years ago.

A lynching was characterized by a commitment to lawlessness and cruelty and a complete disregard for human life. What has been the temperament of American fascism? A commitment to lawlessness and cruelty and a complete disregard for human life. Nothing ancient, right?

The purpose of this thread was to clearly convey that what you may think has been relegated to "ancient history" is not, in fact, ancient history. The insanity you have witnessed for the past 4 years has a connection to a history of national insanity inflicted upon Black people.