I think that is pretty much it. Something bad happened. On many many occasions. To a lot of people. In many states, not just the south.
As for the victims being "nobodies," it is difficult to achieve something notable when you're dead.
I visited the American Somme Memorial this weekend and saw the graves of a bunch of young men who never grew up to get elected to Congress or cure cancer or whatever, because they were dead by the age of 20. That is a big part of the tragedy: lost potential.
A fair enough point, but as I noted - I was only responding to the claim in the article about nobody knowing who they are. This should not be surprising.
I will confess there's a part of me that takes a bit too much of perverse joy when one of these lynchings occurs outside of the South, not because of the deaths (obviously) but because of how many Northerners I've run into in my life that seemingly only know the South for the Civil War, Mississippi Burning, and George Wallace. And THEY, of course, are ABOVE all that.
The TRUTH I've found - in most cases - is they don't even know their own history, which is usually littered with the same problems on a smaller scale. And any of you who have spent any time up north (and Earle has sort of pointed this out more than once) will find that the South (with all of our problems and mistreatment of folks) tends to be well ahead of most of the north in advancing beyond the old bigotries.
I had some friends from U.P. Michigan who apparently got some real bad info in high school because they were only too happy to inform my ex (then wife) and I about race relations in the southern USA, where they'd never been, and how ignorant we must be despite the fact my ex never left the south until she was 33.
Their first assignment? Maxwell AFB.
Their second? Robins AFB, Georgia
Let's just say they got a lotta firsthand education how little they actually knew.
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