They not only encouraged the slaughter; they also committed the sin of omission. The lynching, beating, torturing, and shooting of Black people saw no real intervention by authorities. Over the course of a five-day bloodletting spree, “police arrested only forty whites, or less than 1 percent of the mob’s members.”105 Yet when Blacks who had been hunted for days mistakenly fired on plainclothes officers, the response by the state was an overwhelming, awe-inducing, machine-gun-toting show of force.
