Sarah Osborn, who died at Newport, (Rhode-Island), on the second day of August, 1796. Memoirs of the life of Mrs. In the eighty-third year of her age

Third, relative to the size of the black population, lynchings were exceedingly rare. To be sure, one lynching is one too many. But by the turn of the century, lynchings were hardly the everyday occurrence that they are often remembered as. Compare the 281 victims of lynchings in the 1920s to the number of black infants who died as a result of malnutrition, pneumonia, diarrhea, and the like. As of 1920, about 13 out of every 100 black children died in infancy, or roughly 20,000 children each yearБЂ”compared to 28 people who were lynched in a year. As late as 1940, about 10,000 black infants died each year. What larger truths do these lynching figures suggest? What does it mean that lynchings were relatively rare and that they fell precipitously over time, even in the face of a boom in Klan membership? The most compelling explanation is that all those early lynchings worked. White racistsБЂ”whether or not they belonged to the Ku Klux KlanБЂ”had through their actions and their rhetoric developed a strong incentive scheme that was terribly clear and terribly frightening ...»