![]() ![]() In 1893, Henry Smith, a Black man accused of killing a white girl, was lynched in Paris, Texas, before a crowd estimated at 10,000 people. I have read the histories of communities consumed by the desire to not only kill, but to mutilate. I have stared at the pictures of glassy-eyed men and boys (and sometimes women) standing beneath dangling bodies or standing above charred ones. How did the people in these mobs - made up mostly of white men in the American accounts I’ve read - rev themselves up to peak barbarity? At what point did their humanity go dormant and bloodlust consume their beings? ![]() I have always been interested in the psychology of lynch mobs. ![]()
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