I have a difficult time watching some movies

[CatWoman]

Mississippi Burning is one of them.

Watching so much rage and hatred fills me with rage and hatred.

The men who slaughtered those civil rights workers knew an all-white jury would never convict them.

The smug cock suckers.



Deputy Sheriff Price and Sheriff Rainey at arraignment.
(Neshoba County had the largest per capita consumption of
chewing tobacco of any county in the United States.)

I'm trying to find out what happened to the two assholes above. Thank good someone kept the pressure up, and justice has been meted out.

[uppityperson]

1. Yup.

The smug "we can do anything you want"ness of them.

[KittyWampus]

2. Something I Learned- Lynching Were Rarely Spontaneous Events

spurred by some injustice done to a white person and then taken out on a black scapegoat.

Most often, they were planned a head of time. Organized events that even had flyers passed around 'advertising' them.

I guess it's such a gruesome, shameful memory that we can't imagine it being done with ruthless forethought.

[CatWoman]

4. A friend once told me that the word "picnic"

derived from lynchings, as in "pick a nigger".

Lynchings were social events -- food and gaiety followed the hangings.

ZombyWoof tells me that he can't find evidence in the truth of this origin, but it does make an awful lot of sense.

[KittyWampus]

5. Yeah, I Left Out The Gaiety Aspect. It's Something I Think People Have

to research to really grasp.

And I've never heard the picnic reference.

[uppityperson]

6. dictionary, definitions, history and snopes say nope.

dictionary.com says "French pique-nique, probably reduplication of piquer, to pick"

http://www.answers.com/picnic&r=67 says:
picnic, social gathering at which each participant generally brings food to be shared. The Picnic Society was formed in London early in the 19th cent. by a group of fashionable people for purposes of entertainment. Each member was expected to provide a share of the entertainment and of the refreshments, and this idea of mutual sharing or cooperation was fundamental to the original significance of the picnic. Later the word took on the additional meaning of an outdoor pleasure party. The word as now used includes almost every type of informal, outdoor meal or festivity, such as clambake, barbecue, or fish fry. The custom of cooperative dining is ancient; Greek men held symposia where the guests ate and discussed important matters.

The first usage of the word was traced to a 16th century French text, describing a group of people dining in a restaurant who brought their own wine. A theory has it that the word picnic is based on the verb piquer which means 'pick' or 'peck' with the rhyming nique perhaps meaning trifle.

The 1692 edition of Origines de la Langue Françoise de Ménage, which mentions 'piquenique' as being of recent origin, marks the first appearance of the word in print. The word picnic first appeared in English texts in the mid-1700s, and may have entered the English language from this French word or from the German Picknick

Finally, Urban Legends at Snopes debunks this too. http://www.snopes.com/language/offense/picnic.htm

Now, don't get me started on compulsive.

[KansDem]

8. Sad, but true...

After a couple of hours, men from the crowd shoved the charred remains of Washington into a bag and pulled it behind a car all the way home to Robinson, Texas. Back in Waco, the mob hung the sack in front of a blacksmith's shop for viewing before the constable cut it down and sent Washington's remains to a Waco undertaker. A huge crowd of approximately 15,000 people witnessed the "spectacle" lynching of Jesse Washington; entrepreneurs hawked a variety of beverages and snacks while the African-American youth was being tortured to death. A series of infamous photographs documenting the lynching were converted into taken by an enterprising photographer and converted into postcards. An estimated 50,000 of these grisly souvenirs were later sold or traded.

and...

Within minutes, Walker was hurled onto the pyre, his body quickly enveloped in flames. The crowd roared its approval, and those close to the fire hunched forward, according to a newspaper report, "eagerly watching the look of mingled horror and terror that distorted his blood-smeared face." As the flames scorched his skin, Walker let out a series of awful screams that were heard, according to later testimony, almost a mile away. He seemed close to death when he managed, somehow, to crawl out of the fire. Still breathing, he reached the fence, his back -- as one boy later testified -- "all raw with burns. The onlookers paused in shock for a moment; no one had anticipated this. Then several of them beat him or pushed him with fence rails back into the flames. Shrieking with pain, Walker managed to struggle out a second time, still shackled to the burning footboard. According to witnesses, when he was pushed back in again, his flesh was visibly hanging from his body. To the crowd's amazement, Walker struggled out of the fire a third time. This time they allowed him to crawl almost to their feet, astonished and horrified by what one reporter called "the revolting spectacle his maimed and half-burned body presented to them." Finally, several men swung a rope around his neck, holding it taut at both ends, and pulled him back into the coals. His resistance gone, Zachariah Walker gave one last terrible scream and collapsed. His body was soon obscured by a wall of fire, and the smoke carried the smell of roasting human flesh into the night sky.

The following day, the Coatesville Record remarked on the politeness of the crowd: "Five thousand men, women, and children stood by and watched the proceedings as though it were a ball game or another variety of spectator sport." Boys had stopped for cold soda afterward at the Coatesville Candy Company to retell the story. Many returned to the site the next day to gather fragments of bone and charred flesh as souvenirs.

http://www.americanlynching.com/infamous-old.html

So sad, but true...

[Horse with no Name]

3. "A Time to Kill"

was along the same lines.

[onager]

7. "Four Little Girls"

Spike Lee's documentary about the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham which killed 4 young girls.

I'm not a huge Spike Lee fan, but he should have won the Oscar for that one. It's just heart-breaking, hearing the girls' families and friends talk about the victims.

I grew up in the South (white) during the Civil Rights Era. I distinctly remember this event, because it FINALLY made some (though certainly not all) white folks pull their heads out of their Cheneys and realize NO ONE was safe. If a race-crazed lunatic could throw a bomb into a CHURCH--of all places--and kill 4 black kids, then nobody was safe anywhere.

Minor nitpicks: a few gratuitous celebrities like Reggie Jackson show up, along with the camera-hogging Jesse Jackson. And as an atheist, I could do without the constant references to "God's plan," but that's purely personal. IMHO, any gawd who needs to kill children as part of a plan is insane and so are his followers.