"The best estimate is that between 1880 and 1930, Southern lynch mobs summarily executed, without recourse to legal niceties, 3,320 blacks and 723 whites." (from "Better Day Coming" / Adam Fairclough)

FDR created a Civil Rights Section (CRS) within the Justice Dept. in 1935. In 1942 the CRS instituted the first federal investigation of a lynching.

This grim reality sits squarely between us here in the present and songs from the 1861-1865 Bloodbaths. I'd be very careful in selecting material - or perhaps I would first make sure that I'd read and thought about Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. Du Bois, Julian Bond and the martyred Medgar Evers - before I went out and sang a song from the Civil War Era here in Kentucky.