A Look at Lynching by the Numbers

The Confederate flag no longer flies

 at South Carolina's statehouse.

On the occasion of South Carolina’s removal of the Confederate flag from the statehouse grounds, let's take a quick look at the history of lynching in this country. 

From 1882-1968, 4,743 lynchings occurred in the United States. Of this number, 72.7% of people lynched were black.

Nearly four out of five lynchings—79%—happened in the South. While most of the lynching that took place outside of the South was of whites, 86% of lynching in the southern states (those of the former Confederacy) happened to blacks. 

Mississippi had the most lynchings with 581. Georgia was second with 531, Texas third with 493, and Louisiana fourth with 391. Alaska, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Connecticut had no lynchings between 1882-1968.

South Carolina lynched 160 people during this period. 156 of them were black.

Pennsylvania had 8 lynchings. The last one—of Zachariah Walker, in 1911—was especially notorious. Walker was a black steelworker, dragged to a field outside of Coatesville and murdered by a mob. His death shocked the nation and led to the first federal anti-lynching law.

Note: The statistics quoted above are based on data from the Tuskegee Institute Archives.

The original Penn Station was demolished. That’s a good thing.

This originally appeared on a website I maintained about the Northeast Corridor, Amtrak and commuter rail, which is shutting down later this month. I’m preserving it here on the Redux. 

Originally published October 30, 2013

50 Years On, Why We Might Not Want to Mourn Penn Station’s Passing

To mark the 50th anniversary of the start of demolition of New York’s original Penn Station, The Atlantic Cities reprinted a series of photographs taken of the building in 1962 for the Historic American Buildings Survey. The pictures capture the station in all its monumental beauty: the soaring glass, the arches, the legendary ceiling... and all that light. It cannot be denied that New York lost an architectural treasure when the 1910 structure designed by McKim, Mead, and White was torn down to make way for Madison Square Garden.

Looking at the images another way, though, reveals something else: long exterior blocks of sheer neoclassical walls, repetitive doric columns, yawning windows and stairs all out of proportion to human patrons and the surrounding streetscape. Penn Station, while magnificent, was more a statement of grandeur than a vibrant urban hub.

Today’s Penn Station, for all its cramped ugliness, is midtown’s throbbing heart (albeit with clogged ventricles). Millions navigate its crazy corridors via dozens of entrances and exits, all of which support busy retail and multi-modal transportation services. On the street level, Penn Station, while ignoble, is no imposing barrier. It fits into the flow of surrounding streets and therefore does the job it was built to do, which is increasingly miraculous given that it was designed to handle far fewer travelers than it does today.

Penn Station needs to be replaced, the sooner the better. It is a security nightmare, overcrowded nuisance for regular users and unwelcoming puzzle for visitors to the Big Apple. But the lessons to be learned in designing a new station should incorporate those elements which, in many ways, made Penn Station ’68 better than Penn Station ’10. If we could magically switch today’s Penn Station with the original, that would not be optimal. New York City today needs a station that combines great architecture with ease-of-use, free flow and integration with the surrounding city. This should be the goal of stakeholders as the city moves forward with redevelopment plans.

Let New Jersey Join the E.U.

“New Jersey Faces a Transportation Funding Crisis, With No Clear Solution,” reads today’s New York Times headline. The story is pretty much what you’d expect: people in power ignoring or actively killing funds for infrastructure; steadily decreasing subsidies from Washington; a greater burden placed on commuters at the turnstile and the pump as problems mount and service gets worse.

It’s the same formula for failure we’ve had to deal with in Pennsylvania, but in New Jersey, it’s most acute. As I’ve been saying for years, demographically and economically New Jersey is less like a U.S. state than a small European country, with the same sort of challenges faced by Belgium or Denmark—only far, far less political will or government support available to meet them.

New Jersey is a small country forced to beg for scraps in Washington like every other state, its two senators contending with colleagues from Vermont and Montana for money from an ever-shrinking pie. New Jersey needs and deserves subsidies more than most other states— and not just because it pays more federal taxes than most of them. The Northeast is the lifeblood of the U.S. economy and living on New York City’s doorstep creates transportation and infrastructure needs unique to this hemisphere.

How Libertarianism Erodes Individuality (and Makes Government Bigger)

In a brilliant essay in Salon, David Masciotra distills Libertarianism down to its selfish, anti-intellectual core—and in doing so makes the case for why the movement is neither contrarian, independent nor a foundation for liberty.

While I don't agree with all of Masciotra's analysis (his dismissal of the ideas and efforts of the Founders is both over-simplistic and anachronistic), his indictment of the deep conservatism and social conformity at the root of the post-Ayn Rand cult of individualism is spot on.

Libertarianism is Anti-Populist

"Libertarians," Masciotra writes, "proclaim an anti-government position, but they are only opposing the last measures of protection that remain in place to prevent the government from full mutation into an aristocracy." The dismantling of social programs, regulations and campaign finance rules empower the establishment at the expense of the have-nots and "transform the legislative process into an auction."

Libertarian Small-Government Goals Achieve the Opposite

Individualism tied to a sense of contributing to the collective good is the driving force of social progress. It also creates more autonomous souls. The "me first" mentality of simplistic bootstraps capitalism leads not to individual liberty but to a what-can-I-get approach that, ironically, fails to contribute to the Libertarian's goal of making government irrelevant. We see it in tax evasion among the wealthy and public benefits fraud among the less well-off. We see it in government bailouts and selfish, short-term policies (such as defunding infrastructure, robbing pension funds and neglecting schools) that lead to huge social costs—and government interventions—later on.

By rejecting the idea of an activist government, Libertarians do not eliminate it—they simply make it less efficient, less strategic and more crisis-bound. Investments critical to the future of the public and private economy are left unmade.

Libertarianism is Anti-Responsiblity

Libertarianism devalues the individual's responsibility to the greater good. Paraphrasing the philosopher Charles Taylor, Masciotra notes that ideas of personal freedom are "empty and meaningless without connections to 'horizons of significance'… bonds of empathy and ties of solidarity with people outside of one's own individual pursuits."

Libertarianism erodes the idea of a general sense of societal responsibility—public or private—leaving ideologically-driven largesse a pursuit and privilege of the rich (in nearly every case, aimed not at encouraging social solidarity but in reinforcing a "maker-taker" worldview).

Libertarianism: A Step Backward

How different we are as a nation from when John F. Kennedy famously said in his 1961 inaugural, "Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country."

Kennedy's idea encompasses individual responsibility—to self and others—as well as public activism and service. It's a mid-20th century notion that helped launch a host of social initiatives—from the Peace Corps to the Voting Rights Act to Freedom Riders to Sesame Street—driven by something other than the profit motive.

Though Masciotra seems to believe otherwise, this approach is as native to our culture as free markets, dating back at least as far as the social movements of the 19th century. We should not let modern perversions of the idea of individual liberty—such as Wisconsin governor Scott Walker's attempts to strike public service from his state's public university charter—stamp it out.

It's the First Amendment For a Reason

I come across a lot of Second Amendment types. Here's why I'm a First Amendment guy. 

To my right-leaning and/or libertarian friends on Facebook:

For all your flag waving, sometimes I really don't think you guys care much for America. You certainly don't appear to have much faith in our system of government. To hear you go on, our weak and rotten political structure leaves us forever teetering on the brink of serfdom. "We must be doing something right to last 200 years," sang Haven Hamilton. You seem to think it's a wonder we've made it this far.

A Self-Correcting System

You point to government overreach as the smoking gun. What you fail to appreciate is that public institutions in this country are subject to near-constant scrutiny and vetting. Each “scandal” exposed in the media as an example of menacing authoritarianism is actually a victory for our system of checks, balances and watchdogs—the very things that prevent such nightmare scenarios from taking place. When malfeasance is uncovered and prosecuted, it proves the system, while flawed, works.

Civil society: the true bulwark of freedom.

They key to effective democracy is to protect and shore up the institutions and practices of civil society, the "third pillar" of the social order independent of government and business. This is what countries like Afghanistan, China and Iran lack. This is what was stamped out in Germany and Italy in the 1930s and is under attack today in Russia, Mexico and elsewhere. Wherever you see freedom under threat, it has something to do with weak or ineffective social systems that fail to act as a foil to plutocracy, corruption and arbitrary expressions of power.

"But we have guns!"

All this emphasis on guns = freedom misdiagnoses both the problem and the solution.

Private ownership of guns, either independently or in aggregate, does not prevent the government from doing what it's going to do. It never has and never will. (During the fight against British rule, gun owners were militia members called to serve under officers as active-duty military—the original, limited intent of the Second Amendment.) The frontiersmen of the Whisky Rebellion had plenty of guns. So did bootleggers, counterfeiters, bandits and paramilitary groups (such as the KKK and the James Gang) and every single returning confederate soldier. More recently, the mafia, the Branch Davidians, MOVE, Jim Jones' cult (which committed mass suicide after realizing it was not going to get away with murder), the Symbionese Liberation Army... the list goes on.

Lots of countries have lots of guns. Afghanistan and Pakistan have loads of them, as well as liberal gun laws. They do not keep the peace nor guarantee any other freedoms.

Keep a gun if it makes you feel safer, but don’t delude yourself into thinking it's what separates “citizens from subjects,” as the phrase goes. Only the institutions of civil society, from the Courts to NGOs to school boards to voting registration drives, nonprofits, town hall meetings and public displays of protest, solidarity and disobedience—and most critically, a free press—can do that. Guns, to the extent they create fear in the streets, can actually work against these essential bulwarks of our freedom.