So today, I was listening to a podcast and they mentioned the lynching of Claude Neal, a little bit of America's dark past I hadn't heard of before. I looked it up, and was utterly stunned.

I mean, I knew in a sort of intellectual, historical sense that lynchings occurred, but I never knew they were PARTIES. I didn't know they were advertised in the motherloving NEWSPAPER before ("Where his body will be mutilated by the father...") and that several thousand people would gladly take part in the torture, murder and mutilation of a man accused of murder. Not convicted, accused...

It was not an isolated incident, of course. Lynchings continued into the '60s, even the 80s and, arguably, 90s. A blood drenched history, that is NOT dead, that lives and breathes and damns the USA still. The story of this evil (there is no other word for it) will haunt me...

And then. And then I see this. The South shall rise again, indeed.