Republican claims blacks and whites were lynched at equal rates in MLK Day message

[Igel]

30. So much talking past each other.

Her claim was simple but you have to read it instead of assume you know what it means.

One person--one--in the news article takes on her claim and challenges it, but in a way that basically says, "She's citing a bad source" and, at the same time, saying, "If it's true, it's a coincidence, so who the hell knows for sure?" Followed by the true but in some ways irrelevant "but the Republican party of today isn't like the one during in the decades after the Civil War."

Confused? Yeah.

Her claim can be paraphrased this way:

1. In the relevant years, there were a number of white Republicans who were lynched.

2. During those same years, there were a number of black Republicans who were lynched.

3. Those two numbers are the same or nearly so.

This means that the total number of lynched blacks versus lynched whites is meaningless (although it's always good to remind people that lynching isn't race neutral but also isn't race specific). All that matters for the truth of her absurdly specific claim is that the number of Republicans who were lynched and black is about the same as the number of Republicans who were lynched and white. If this were a reading test, most people would have failed.

I, for one, would be surprised that anybody could show this to be true. Or, for that matter, false--seriously, for the set of people lynched, who kept political party documentation? However, the lack of evidence isn't proof that the claim is false, so maybe it's trivially true--few were lynched for their party affiliation per se. The one person taking the claim head on, in proper fashion (instead of tackling a strawman with great force and purpose, followed by smug strutting), merely says that she got the claim from a book, Setting the Record Straight: American History in Black & White, and that the book was in error. (Reading between the lines I sense that this applies in a general sense, not just to this claim, i.e., "the book is a joke" but the guy didn't explicitly and clearly go there). I'd have liked numbers, but if they exist, I'd be quietly surprised.

Now, the current (R) and former (R) parties are quite different, so the truth or falseness of the claim appears to be really irrelevant to her speech and the connections she seems to draw.