Law enforcement officers actively enabled lynch mobs against prosperous Black men

Evidence

As soon as Crawford was released on bail, fifty white people cornered him and beat and stabbed him. The sheriff threw him back into jail, but not long after, a deputy handed the keys to Crawford’s cell over to the angry crowd. They dragged Crawford out and strung him up at a baseball field on the outskirts of town. In a letter to The Abbeville Press and Banner, one Mrs. J. B. Holman wrote that Crawford “seems to have been the type of Negro who is most offensive to certain elements of the white people…. He was getting rich, for a Negro, and he was insolent along with it.” No one was ever brought to justice for his murder. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 314

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s prior work on ritual human sacrifice and state-sanctioned mob violence as communal acts, plus moral panics where victim’s success triggers punishment.