From Austin, Texas, comes this horrific story:
Police on Wednesday were pleading for witnesses to help
them track down members of an angry mob that beat a man
to death after the car he was riding in apparently struck
and injured a child.
Investigators were struggling to piece together what happened
Tuesday when David Rivas Morales died defending the driver
from members of a crowd leaving a Juneteenth celebration.
There could have been anywhere from two to 20 attackers,
Austin Police Commander Harold Piatt said.
The car in which Morales, 40, was a passenger had entered
an apartment complex's parking lot when it struck a 3- or
4-year-old child, Piatt said. The child was taken to a
hospital with non-life-threatening injuries.
The driver got out of the car to check on the child and was
confronted by several people, Piatt said. When they attacked
the driver, Morales got out of the car to protect the driver
and was attacked as well... The driver got away and is
cooperating with investigators, who are not releasing his
name.
This happened on the same day that The Wall Street Journal carried an
op-ed
piece by John Steele Gordon, in which Gordon--writing about the Scottsboro
Boys, a group of young black men who were falsely accused of raping a pair
of
white women--observes that they were in danger of being lynched and that a
lynch mob "is almost inconceivable today." We emailed Gordon and asked for
his
comments on the Austin killing:
I don't think this is the same as a classic lynching.
A lynching is planned, however quickly, with a definite object in
mind: the meting out of immediate justice by the death of the
perceived wrongdoer. This was unplanned, a spontaneous response
to an event that took place before their eyes. The wrongdoer--if
such he was; it's unclear if he could have avoided the child--was
not even the one killed.
So I think this differs from a lynching in much the same way
as the old definitions of first- and second-degree murder differ.
First-degree murder is planned: the husband decides to kill his
two-timing wife and does so. Second- degree is unplanned: the
husband finds his wife in bed with another man and kills her
there and then in a fit of rage. Both are terrible crimes, of
course, and severely punished, but the law drew a distinction
(and, I think, a valid one) between them.
And, of course, lynchings in Jim Crow days had social
acceptability. People even had their photographs taken
beside the dangling bodies sometimes and it was by no means
unknown for the local authorities to make no attempt to prevent
the outrage. In this case the crowd quickly melted away (I'd be
happily surprised if anyone is brought to justice in this case)
and the community, I am sure, is appalled at what happened.
It's also unclear what role race played in the Austin incident. One may
infer
from the victim's name and the occasion for which the crowd had gathered
(Juneteenth, short for June 19, is a celebration of the emancipation of
Texas'
slaves) that he was Hispanic and they are probably black. None of the news
re****ts we've seen, however, have spelled this out.
That may be a good decision. There is something to be said for the
journalistic practice of leaving race out of crime stories in the absence
of a
compelling reason to include it (such as the physicial description of a
suspect on the loose, or clear evidence that the crime racially
motivated).
On the other hand, if the mob had been white and the victim black, would
the
press have shown such restraint?
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