This time, blaming black for crime didn’t work

“It is unknown how many white men committed crimes for which mobs lynched African American men, but occasionally the community caught the white culprit. In Raleigh, North Carolina, Charles E. Davis, a ‘prominent Wake County farmer,’ claimed in 1920 that an unidentified black man had murdered his wife. After authorities began to doubt his story that a ‘lecherous looking black’ had killed her, they arrested Davis for killing his wife, and he hung himself in the county jail.”

— From “Raising Racists: The Socialization of White Children in the Jim Crow South” by Kristina DuRocher (2011)

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