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‘No One Saw a Thing’: When a Midwest Town Banded Together to Kill the Town Bully

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Re: ‘No One Saw a Thing’: When a Midwest Town Banded Together to Kill the Town Bully

#51

Post by pazimzadeh »

mieseratte wrote: post #34
neaden wrote: post #2

To be clear, community murders like this happened all the time in US history. The thing that makes this special is that the man killed was white and actually guilty of crimes.

> The thing that makes this special is that the man killed was white From https://www.naacp.org/history-of-lynchings/ > Out of the 4,743 people lynched only 1,297 white people were lynched. Would not appear that being white and lynched are not necessarily unique, though perhaps for the time period.

Many of those whites were probably black-sympathizers who would have been called n*-lovers or "black on the inside."

Re: ‘No One Saw a Thing’: When a Midwest Town Banded Together to Kill the Town Bully

#52

Post by faissaloo »

pazimzadeh wrote: post #51
mieseratte wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The thing that makes this special is that the man killed was white From https://www.naacp.org/history-of-lynchings/ > Out of the 4,743 people lynched only 1,297 white people were lynched. Would not appear that being white and lynched are not necessarily unique, though perhaps for the time period.

Many of those whites were probably black-sympathizers who would have been called n *-lovers or "black on the inside."

Also 'coalburners' for the women who married/slept with black men

Re: ‘No One Saw a Thing’: When a Midwest Town Banded Together to Kill the Town Bully

#53

Post by ceejayoz »

jascii wrote: post #27
IronWolve wrote: post #19

This is still going on in Alaska, many remote areas have some bullies getting away due to no police. I'm sure some end up missing too, but there is a big lack of funding for state marshals to deal with the problems.

I am not saying you are wrong, however this comment would be a lot more useful/interesting if you mentioned some sources.

It's worse than that in some spots. In some areas, the bullies are the police.

https://www.propublica.org/article/stebbins-alaska-cops-crim...

> In Stebbins alone, all seven of the police officers working as of July 1 have pleaded guilty to domestic violence charges within the past decade. Only one has received formal law enforcement training of any kind.

Re: ‘No One Saw a Thing’: When a Midwest Town Banded Together to Kill the Town Bully

#54

Post by tootie »

SolaceQuantum wrote: post #3

This is a review of the documentary covering a 'Town Bully' who had evaded authorities and continued to harm people repeatedly. In order to protect the community, a group of vigilantes murdered them, and the community refused to issue any statements to authorities regarding anyone's involvement. I think broadly, I wonder what the place of vigilanteism like this should serve. The sentiments to protect the community ag…

It sounds like the justice system was either non-functional or corrupt. He committed plenty of crimes that should have put him away for a long time yet didn't. If government isn't serving the people appropriately then it gets replaced. Hard to say if it was really justified here. Maybe a call to the FBI would have been more productive.

Re: ‘No One Saw a Thing’: When a Midwest Town Banded Together to Kill the Town Bully

#55

Post by AndrewBissell »

jgwil2 wrote: post #37
ProAm wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That doesn't make the actions acceptable, of course. But it does put a spotlight on the importance of having a working legal system that provides some reasonable level of protection to the larger community. This man was tried and convicted by a jury of his peers, it was just in a different courtroom.

That's the kind of logic used to justify lynchings. We have a legal system that enforces a certain burden of proof, that takes place in a courtroom where strict procedure is enforced by an ostensibly impartial judge, and evidence is weighed by an impartial jury. The system is carefully set up to balance the rights of the accused against the interests of the community. It may not work all the time, but it exists for a…

When the legal system is perverted by local corruption and nepotism, allowing bad actors to run roughshod over their victims, are they supposed to just lie down and take it out of dedication to an abstract principle which has been wholly betrayed in practice?

Re: ‘No One Saw a Thing’: When a Midwest Town Banded Together to Kill the Town Bully

#56

Post by tdb7893 »

rolltiide wrote: post #45
widowlark wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

helplessly racist? Thousands of lynchings occurred like this across the country for a hundred years - you can bet they weren't lynching whites more often.

According to the NAACP A) many states had more white people lynched than blacks B) The concentration of the south eastern states did make black people the victims more often both statistically and numerically, by a large margin but C) White people being killed was not a statistical outlier. So there is no novelty. D) “White” didn't include Italians, known Jewish people, any many others at the time. Not until the late…

The link you posted said that a lot more black people were lynched than white people and also that many of the white people lynched were lynched for just helping black people. It really makes it sound like it was primarily racially motivated

Re: ‘No One Saw a Thing’: When a Midwest Town Banded Together to Kill the Town Bully

#58

Post by mieseratte »

pazimzadeh wrote: post #51
mieseratte wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The thing that makes this special is that the man killed was white From https://www.naacp.org/history-of-lynchings/ > Out of the 4,743 people lynched only 1,297 white people were lynched. Would not appear that being white and lynched are not necessarily unique, though perhaps for the time period.

Many of those whites were probably black-sympathizers who would have been called n *-lovers or "black on the inside."

> Many of those whites were probably black-sympathizers

I'm sure some were. Would be great if we had more information.

Re: ‘No One Saw a Thing’: When a Midwest Town Banded Together to Kill the Town Bully

#59

Post by saidajigumi »

tootie wrote: post #48
dwheeler wrote: post #10

> frontier justice came for McElroy courtesy of the residents of Skidmore (population 440 at the time of the crime). Shaken by the man’s ability to evade jail even after being convicted of a near-fatal attack on a grocery store owner... Belkin also details Skidmore’s plague of subsequent violence ... the series persuasively contends that these crimes indicate that the McElroy episode taught younger Skidmore generatio…

The fact that the Sheriff was involved in the conspiracy is fishy.

Or completely expected, if the broader narrative of a legal system that has ceded to lawlessness is true. Law enforcement is on the literal front-lines in dealing with violent repeat offenders as described here.

Re: ‘No One Saw a Thing’: When a Midwest Town Banded Together to Kill the Town Bully

#60

Post by mieseratte »

tdb7893 wrote: post #56
rolltiide wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to the NAACP A) many states had more white people lynched than blacks B) The concentration of the south eastern states did make black people the victims more often both statistically and numerically, by a large margin but C) White people being killed was not a statistical outlier. So there is no novelty. D) “White” didn't include Italians, known Jewish people, any many others at the time. Not until the late…

The link you posted said that a lot more black people were lynched than white people and also that many of the white people lynched were lynched for just helping black people. It really makes it sound like it was primarily racially motivated

> It really makes it sound like it was primarily racially motivated

Were most lynchings? The numbers and history sure make it sound that way.

'rolltiide also has a point, that to take things as one giant pile of numbers masks regional variations. That and I don't know why people need to shoe-horn race relations into every article they can. It's not as if lynching is a long untold story, though maybe I'm slanted having spent time in the south where it is a well known facet of history.

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