An interesting way to lie with statistics. I drove a statistician friend in tears from reading this to him. Drawing the conclusion that hanging offenders is a totally unsubstantiate leap. It's like assuming that someone involved in a car accident was drunk because most car accidents involve drunk drivers. The song doesn't even necessarily refer to vigilante justice, much less lynchings. In the video the "heros" are law officers attempting to apprehend a serial killer, not vigilantes. The offender in that instance was white. The only way you could get to the conclusion that the song is racist is to start with that assumption and look for evidence that supports that view. The song is a metaphor for strong justice, nothing else.

Besides, even attempting to assoicate this song with those racist lynchings just shows an ignorance of US history and popular culture. Very few Americans are aware of the lynchings the Tuskegee Institute refers to; it's a past we want to put behinds us. Frontier justise at the end of a rope was romaticized by western novels and movies to the point that it would be the only thing that the typical American audience for Country music would think of.

So don't be surprised if none of the people for whom this song was intended see it as racist. The lynchings described by the Tuskegee Institute are horrifying (if anything fewer than what I was lead to believe), but you're going to have to look somewhere else to find anyone glorying in them.