On May 25, 1911, Laura Nelson, her baby daughter and her teenaged son were kidnapped from a jail in Oklahoma by an angry mob. The two had been jailed for what, by all accounts, seemed to be the accidental death of a deputy sheriff during a scuffle at the Nelsons' home where police were investigating the theft of a cow. Laura's husband, her children's father, pled guilty to the theft and been taken to prison.

Laura and her son were awaiting trial in the jail when a group of between 12-40 men broke into the jail and took them out. Laura was reportedly raped by members of the mob, and some reports say that her son Lawrence was castrated, before both were hung from a bridge. A photograph shows 58 spectators on the bridge as the two bodies hang below, including 35 men, six women and 17 children. It is not known what became of Laura's baby daughter, although at least one account says that she was taken in and cared for.

To think of this as "mob justice" defies reason. Laura and her son were awaiting justice - or what there was of it in early-20th-century Oklahoma - in jail. What was done to them was not the product of any kind of justice, but of blind hatred and a desire to "teach a lesson" to lesser (black) beings who dared commit any kind of crime against their white superiors. Like all such grotesque crimes, its purpose was to keep African Americans "in their place."

According to the Tuskeegee Institute, 3,446 blacks and 1,297 whites were lynched in the years between 1882 and 1968. Anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells found that the most common accusation against black lynching victims was murder or attempted murder, while about 30% were accused of rape or attempted rape, with the remainder accused of everything from "... verbal and physical aggression, spirited business competition, (to) independence of mind."

Given this horrifying legacy, it is understandable that black Americans today would be wary of any solutions to current problems with policing that might smack of vigilante justice. It is understandable that those of us who call, not for reform, but for an end to policing as we know it, run up against a wall of resistance from those whose only other point of reference is uncontrolled vigilante mobs.

And yet it is also clear that the current state of law enforcement in this country - especially for African Americans - has reached an unacceptable level of violence and abuse. More than one commentator has drawn the comparison between the lynchings from the past and what have now become routine murders by police officers of - often unarmed - black Americans.

- See more at: http://bretigne.typepad.com/on_the_banks/2016/03/must-we-choose-between-mob-justice-and-the-police-state.html#sthash.Xxfagabe.dpuf