A lynching every week for 73 years

It has been long known that lynching was not the uncommon occurrences in the US post the Civil War, as some people try to paint it as, but now the Atlanta Blackstar has an article, that tells us that lynchings were even more widespread than we had realized.

New Report Compiles A Devastating Count of Nearly 4,000 Lynchings of Black People in the US, Showing This Form of White Terrorism Had Profound Impact on American History

There were 3,959 Black people lynched in the United States between 1877 and 1950—a number that is 700 more than previously known—and Georgia, Mississippi and Louisiana had more lynchings than any other state in the country. These revelations are contained in an astounding new report by the Alabama-based Equal Justice Initiative that attempts to place this horrid form of American racial terrorism in its proper historical context as a tool of white supremacy that had a profound impact on the nation.

The report, called “Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror,” ties lynching to a broader picture of white social control, showing how lynchings affected African-American migration patterns, effectively turning many Southern communities from predominantly Black to overwhelmingly white virtually overnight and sending millions of Black people to the cities of the North to escape this terrorism. It is a significantly more nuanced view of how whites used lynching to serve particular purposes—and how lynchings were a seldom-discussed driver of the Great Migration of Black people to the North.

A summary of the report can be found here (pdf).

So, after investigating lynchings, the report found that there had been 3,959 lynchings over 73 years. That is an average of more than 54 lynchings per year, or put differently, it means that there was, on average, one lynching per week for 73 years!

This is an horrifying thought.

After having posted about this on facebook, one of my facebook friends wrote:

When you hear about lynching now, it's cast as some sort of anomaly, somehow separate from the main stream of US experience. But Kristjan's average really puts it in perspective: anything that happens once a week for 70+ years is Normal with a capital N; it WAS the US experience. It barely rated news coverage, just as these days black deaths in the inner cities barely rate a mention on any but the local news.

That is a great way of putting it. When we are talking such numbers, we are not talking anomalies - we are talking routine. This was the daily life of people living back then.

Remember this, when people try to dismiss the concept of institutionalized racism or downplay how bad racism was in the past.

Lazy linking

I used to do a lot of lazy linking posts, which are posts linking to things I find interesting. The main reason for the decline in these posts, is that I now link to such things from my Twitter account. Still, I'll try to make these posts from time to time, if nothing else then to give some linklove to other people.

First of, a fairly old blogpost about old atomic models in the past: The gallery of failed atomic models, 1903-1913

From the mainstream media, BBC reports on the findings of an rather interesting meteorite: Attic stored meteorite 'four billion years old'

Ed Brayton reports that the Innocence Project Frees 250th Innocent Person

And then there is the news that quack Kevin Trudeau has been hold in content of the court, because he asked his followers to write the judge, resulting in an email deluge.

On the anthropogenic global warming front, Climate Progress reports that Penn State inquiry finds no evidence for allegations against Michael Mann.

Via Sheril Kirshenbaum, I became aware of the Under the Microscope website, dedicated to women in science.

Over at Majikthise, Lindsay Beyerstein takes on the claims that the fathers of modern obstetrics murder more women than Jack the Ripper. Personally I find Lindsay's speculations more convincing than the new claims.

Over at Alternet, Greta Christina writes about Why We Don't Need Religion to Give Life Mystery (also at her own blog)

Mysterious cable in Greenland

Via the Danish version of Computerworld, I became aware of this weird little story.

A company, Greenland Connect, is currently using the ship Ile de Sein to put down cables in the fjord outside Qaqortoq, and while doing this, they found the remains of an old telegraph cable, which appears to be from the thirties.

The interesting part is, that no one knows what the telegraph cable connected, and who used it. Now, they are asking the public to share any knowledge they might have on the matter.

The story is covered here (Danish article) with an email address in case you have some information which might shine some light on this mystery.

'Infinite series' in math wrongly attributted to Newton?

ScienceDaily has the story about some new claims that infinite series in math, one of the building stone of the foudnation of modern math, has been wrongly attributted to Sir Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibnitz.
The real discoveres were members of the Kerala School of math in India, back around 1350, several hundred years before the discovery was attributed to Newton and Leibnitz.

Indians Predated Newton 'Discovery' By 250 Years, Scholars Say

A little known school of scholars in southwest India discovered one of the founding principles of modern mathematics hundreds of years before Newton -- according to new research.

The claims are the findings of Dr George Gheverghese Joseph, who discovered it "while trawling through obscure Indian papers for a yet to be published third edition of his best selling book 'The Crest of the Peacock: the Non-European Roots of Mathematics'".

While I find this interesting, I am skeptical, and would like to see the findings verified by others. And even if it's true, it seems somewhat unlikely that the knowledge travelled from India to Newton through Jesuits monks, as Dr Joseph think might have happened. If that had happened, there would likely be some kind of records of this knowledge - Jesuits were known to write a lot of stuff down.

Anyway, quite interesting.