So pleased to see this from @BrentNYT. In “On The Courthouse Lawn” I wrote extensively about the failures of the white press in its reporting on lynchings, leaving the Black press “to speak to & about Blacks, who experienced firsthand the consequences of lynching.”
https://twitter.com/brentnyt/status/1414195087303712771
The white press also used erasure to gaslight and minimize the truth about white violence. The day after Matthew Williams was lynched in Salisbury, MD in 1931, the local paper - The Salisbury Times - issued a “Statement” below the fold. It read:
“This paper is omitting the details of the demonstration here last night….for the very obvious reason that almost every reader of our paper had an opportunity to learn of them firsthand from eyewitnesses.”
Yes, DEMONSTRATION. Also, one of the publishers was an eyewitness.
Yes, DEMONSTRATION. Also, one of the publishers was an eyewitness.
Last thing. The courage of Black reporters must be acknowledged as well. Clarence Mitchell, then a reporter for the AFRO newspaper raced to the site of George Armwood’s lynching in 1933 & began interviewing witnesses the next morning as excited whites milled abt the streets.
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