Racist newspaper narratives deliberately escalated southern anti-Black violence.

Evidence

As White southern violence spread, Democratic newspapers published stories arguing that masters’ loss of control was energizing the Black crime wave. Southerners also read stories of the “murder and mutilation” of Whites in Jamaica by “infuriated negro savages, bent on destroying the civilization which surrounds and vexes them.” Jamaica’s 1865 revolt was, in fact, a freedom fight against British slavery in everything but name. So it made sense that those who were trying to re-enslave the emancipated in the United States feared another Jamaica. They used any opportunity to attack Black communities to prevent it, and every racist idea to justify their attacks. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 643

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: did the Jamaica revolt and its coverage directly influence US racist policy in 1865-66, or is Kendi asserting a moral parallel rather than a causal one?
• XREF: connects to: State discrimination triggered a sequence of escalating anti-Tamil riots. — Neil DeVotta, Sinhalese Buddhist Nationalist…, 606; Mississippi’s leading segregationist newspapers ran openly racist headlines during civil rights era — Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White…, 116