against wholeheartedly. The injustices that were quite evident during Furman’s initial trial were not hidden from the public and there was intense pressure to recant a decision that was based on race and not on justice. Even the working conservative class had to some extent been won over to he anti-racism agenda. Those were heady days and anything resembling prejudice was apt to be thrown out the window. The question is why the initial decision went against Furman when the evidence against him was so flimsy. According to Robert McKeever: “In the debate over traditional versus progressive attitudes toward crime and punishment, the traditionalists have won out on the Court just as surely as they have elsewhere in the American political system.” America may have become a land of liberals but the American South was still a conservative heartland. The idea that racial prejudice did not exist in Georgia was refuted by statistical and anecdotal evidence. The political mentality of lynching had been deeply ingrained in the American South. That is one of the reasons that Furman was first convicted. Georgia has a long history of racist violence against its ethnic minorities. Between 1880 and 1930, 3,220 blacks were lynched by mobs in the southern states of the USA, 460 of them in Georgia; this compares with 723 whites during the same period (49 of them in Georgia). The lynching of blacks - without any investigation of the alleged crime - was socially acceptable in Georgia. In 1897, Rebecca Felton - a journalist for the Atlanta Constitution - when addressing the State Agricultural Society of Georgia stated: If it takes lynching to protect women’s dearest possession [a reference to the fear of the rape of white women by black men], then I say lynch a thousand a week if it becomes necessary.” The best citizens of the community often led Lynch mobs. The mob that lynched a black man in Macon, Georgia, in 1922 followed...
