Census worker lynched in Kentucky

On 12 September 2009, 51 year old Bill Sparkman, a white census worker in Kentucky, was found dead, tied to tree, with a noose around his neck and the words "fed" scrawled across his chest. The area where he was found is allegedly "anti-government" and hostile to outsiders:

Appalachia — particularly eastern Kentucky — has long had an image of being wary of and sometimes hostile toward strangers. Incidents such as the September 1967 shooting of Canadian filmmaker Hugh O'Connor — who was gunned down by an enraged landowner while making a documentary on poverty in nearby Letcher County — have done nothing to dispel such notions. O'Connor was killed as President Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty highlighted the region's destitution. Many locals, such as confessed shooter Hobart Ison, had long since grown tired of outsiders exploiting the region's natural resources. [Source:AP]

Historically African Americans linked "anti-government" with anti-black racism and lynch mobs. Although the formal definition of a lynching is a murder carried out by a mob, we typically associate lynchings with murder by hanging. For several hundred years, indeed for most of America's existence, lynch mobs and hangings went hand in hand--extrajudicial mob "justice" was routinely carried out on black or other non-white victims. Yet, Mr. Sparkman's tragic death is a gruesome reminder that white racial terror sometimes victimized white Americans too.