The US compensated white lynching victims but never black ones

Evidence

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Are you telling me that the United States paid reparations for white people who were lynched, but not for any black people who were lynched?” — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 25

Although the overwhelming majority of victims of racial violence in the United States have been black, it might come as a surprise to find out that “of the [fifty-one] white men murdered by lynch mobs” between roughly 1890 and 1910, some 40 percent were Sicilians. What is even more amazing is that the federal government paid compensation for sixteen of those deaths. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 122

Categorization

• XREF: The racial asymmetry in who America compensates is the root of the book’s central claim — the ‘as American as apple pie’ argument.
• ADDENDUM: Directly supports the reparations argument by contrast: the federal government paid reparations to Sicilian lynching victims’ families, showing reparations to a wronged group were feasible and did happen.
• QUESTION: Why sixteen of fifty-one but not others? On what basis was compensation determined, and how does that scale compare to any redress ever offered Black victims of lynching?
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations: How Building a…, 25; Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations: How Building a…, 122