Matthew Yglesias » The Lynching of Bobby Hall
The right wing media is going after Shirley Sherrod.
Item nine million in the conservative racial cluelessness files comes from Jeffrey Lord and the American Spectator who insist that Shirley Sherrod was wrong to say that sheriff Claude Screws lynched her relative Bobby Hall. Lord cites the following evidence from the Screws v US Government case to insist that the Hall lynching tale is just more of the vast liberal media conspiracy to keep the right-wing down:
Lord’s article, which is quite extensive, seems to be based on the theory that being beaten to death by a mob on the courthouse steps with the complicity of local law enforcement doesn’t count as “lynching” because nobody was hung from a tree. But considering the length of his article on the matter, you’d think he might have looked up the term in question. To lynch is “to seize somebody believed to have committed a crime and put him or her to death immediately and without trial, usually by hanging.” Or perhaps “to put to death, esp. by hanging, by mob action and without legal authority.” Or maybe “to put to death (as by hanging) by mob action without legal sanction.”
Read the whole thing, including the American Spectator article.
This is shameful.