There seems to be no limit to the determination of the Lexington Herald-Leader to both distort history and consciously keep racial unrest alive, well, and dominant in its coverage-area. Its front-page, above-the-fold headline of June 13: Lynching era was ‘the American holocaust.’ Above it was a less noticeable sub-head: 4,743 LIVES WERE TAKEN. It is inconceivable that such blatantly obvious America-hating propaganda could emanate from a Kentucky city newspaper, albeit a monopoly organ responsible only to its corporate owner, Knight-Ridder, but this sort of rant, besides being warped and dishonest, is routine for the H-L.
The definition of “holocaust” (Merriam-Webster Collegiate, 11th Edition): the mass slaughter of European civilians and especially Jews by the Nazis during World War II. This slaughter was wreaked upon six million Jews and probably about five million Christians and others. It was perpetrated by the German government as an official operation in roughly 1932-45, with most of the carnage occurring 1940-45 during World War II. Using the six-year period 1940-45, this works out to about 1,833,000 murders per year or about 5,025 per day, far more in one day than all the lynchings, according to the H-L, that took place during the 86-year “lynching-period” 1882-1968, and of which of the 4,743 total 1,297 (27%) were not African Americans. Whereas the holocaust in Europe was due to an enactment that made it an official government operation, the lynchings were carried out in this country by a handful of criminals, mostly in the South. The notion that the lynchings were American, the obvious implication being that they were government policy as charged in the H-L headline and spurious story, is so dishonest that the publisher should publicly apologize, also on the front page…but this won’t happen.
The lynchings represented a horrible, animalistic practice of hooliganism, and just one such hanging was one death too many. All the individuals and families affected by these murders have a right to hate the people who carried them out, and they have the right to hate all the white people in the country if they feel so disposed. However, I resent the H-L charge deeply, particularly because my great-grandfather (wounded once), two great-uncles, and my wife’s great-grandfather fought in the Union Army, even though, being Kentuckians and not subject to the draft, they were not required to do so. They certainly never owned and therefore never abused slaves.
The constant drumbeat in the H-L about slavery, race, lynchings, and all the rest of the hatemongering that results from the seemingly endless front-page stuff accruing to these subjects has worn thin, probably even among most African Americans, for whom these ramblings form a persistent reminder of things every adult knows about and every student learns about in school. The facts should not be forgotten, but the generations associated with them have long been dead, and those living now, as well as those who have tried diligently especially through government action to right a wrong for which they have borne no responsibility, should take the H-L stuff for just what it is – hatemongering that promotes divisiveness, ill feeling, and, worse, the relentless insistence made to young African Americans that they are forever in every generation to be considered victims and, as such, entitled to whatever they can cadge from the system. Disgusting!
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
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