The lynching of federal-appointed postmaster over skin colour
In 1898, the federal-appointed postmaster for Lake City, South Carolina, Frazier Baker, was lynched, along with his baby daughter, Julia.
This was a lynching by bullets, which also hit his wife, Lavinia and four of their children.
The crime which incensed the white mob that descended on their house (also the town post office)? That of being a black postmaster – no more, no less. And no one was ever convicted.
White supremacists all over the South were infuriated at President McKinley’s postings of Black federal employees; he had spoken out against lynching to secure the Black vote when he was running for president.
This sentiment led directly to the massacre in Wilmington later that year, which destroyed the Black prosperity in the North Carolina port and turned the previously majority-Black town majority-White, practically overnight.
It also dismantled the rising and successful Fusionist party, a coalition of working-class Blacks and Whites.
Lavinia Baker and her five surviving children escaped and relocated to Boston.
People love to talk about ‘get over it’ and ‘slavery was so long ago’ and ‘Black people love to be victims’ – when the issue is truly systemic and not dismantled in a day.
Let’s not forget that the white poor (and that of every other race) also get left behind in this scheme which only benefits the few.
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