Participation in racial violence could directly launch political careers

Evidence

It is not just that this history fostered a view of Black people as presumptively criminal; it also cultivated a tolerance for employing any level of brutality to maintain the racial hierarchy. In 1904 in Mississippi, a Black man was accused of shooting a white landowner who had attacked him. A white mob captured him and the woman with him, cut off their ears and fingers, drilled corkscrews into their flesh, and then burned them alive, while hundreds of white spectators enjoyed deviled eggs and lemonade. The landowner’s brother, Woods Eastland, presided over the violence. He was later elected district attorney of Scott County, Mississippi, a position that launched his son James Eastland, an avowed white supremacist, to the U.S. Senate; he served six terms, and was president pro tempore from 1972 to 1978. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 849

Categorization

• SHARE: The detail that the mob’s presiding figure became a district attorney and his son a six-term senator (culminating in president pro tempore) is the sort of specific, chilling career-ladder fact worth sending to a historian friend.
• XREF: connects to: Contentious violence against minorities can yield major electoral gains for the aggressors’ party. — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 1334