Five ugly and uncanny parallels between lynchings and police killings in America

by Shaun King

It's hard to think of anything that was uglier in post-slavery America than lynching. From 1882 to 1964, the archives at Tuskegee University documented that at least 3,445 African Americans were brutally lynched in the United States. While these lynchings are most commonly remembered as hangings from trees, the lynchings in this statistic include men, women, and children who were shot, burned, and beaten to death in every tortuous way imaginable. At its core, to be lynched is not a method of killing, but it is to be murdered without due process.
What is often overlooked is that police, during the height of lynching, were complicit in most lynchings. In  the book Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880-1930, it was determined that 64 percent of lynching victims in the early 20th century were actually seized from jails.
While historical lynchings and modern-day murders at the hands of police have some differences, many of the legal, physical, and emotional parallels are frightening. What follows below the fold are seven troubling similarities between the two.
1. The universal agreement is that the number of lynchings and police murders have both been seriously underreported.
2. The excuses given to justify lynchings and police killings are tragically bad.
3. The lynchings and police killings of African Americans are outrageously brutal and excessive.
4. Few instances in history exist where people are held truly liable for lynchings or police killings.
5. The character of the men and women who were lynched by mobs or killed by police is assassinated as a sick form of justification for the killing.

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