Re: Bicycle outing with happy ending

On Thu, 22 May 2025 12:48:25 -0500, AMuzi <am@yellowjersey.org> wrote:

On 5/22/2025 12:17 PM, Frank Krygowski wrote:

On 5/21/2025 9:21 PM, AMuzi wrote:

On 5/21/2025 6:12 PM, Frank Krygowski wrote:

On 5/21/2025 4:41 PM, AMuzi wrote:

>
But the public reaction to several well publicized
instances of institutional abuse of mentally ill spurred
politicians to act, which was widely supported at the
time.  Those were horrible, and real, but not
representative.
>
The unintended consequences now punish the citizenry
generally more than the inmates before 1963.

>
And that should be a lesson in why general public policy
should not be driven by extreme outlier cases.
>

>
OK, what's an outlier and what's not?
>
Emmett Till?

 
The murder of Emmett Till was not an outlier, which was the
main point of the publicity it generated.
 
Emmett Till's murder was an example, bringing to public
consciousness a widespread practice of lynchings and general
oppression of black people in the deep south.
 
Sometimes one incident can call attention to a big problem,
but that doesn't make the incident an outlier, except
perhaps in its press-worthiness.
 
 

>
Not  unique, but the total is much less than most people think:
>
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1175147/lynching-by-race-state-and-race/
>
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/map-shows-over-a-century-of-documented-lynchings-in-united-states-180961877/
>
Roughly 86 per year.
>
Ohio, for example 10 white, 16 black.
>
Emmet Till's murder was significant in many ways and an
oultier in the sense that most received no publicity whatsoever.
>
There's nothing good to say about that, but Emmett Till's
death was a significant event toward passage of Mr
Eisenhower's 1957 Civil Rights Act.
>
As always, one man's crucial incident is another's
meaningless trivia.
>
p.s. The first USA lynching was of a group of Italians in
New Orleans. No one talked about 'civil rights' in that
context, and yet they did die at the end of a rope.

But I wonder... how many that were hung were in fact guilty of the
crime that they were executed for?
 In the Italian lynching 6 of the 19 had been declared innocent.
( it was also the introduction of the word "mafia" into the U.S.
dialect)
 
--
cheers,

John B.