There is no internet (let alone social media or body cams) during that era, since Jim Crow in America was still being enforced towards black people at that time, but the civil rights movement is gaining traction (since Martin Luther King was alive). I mean, cop violence has been around for a long time before body cams were invented. How did people hear first hand encounters from those victimized back then without reliance on social media?
White people mostly didn’t. Black people talked to each other.
The thing is, white people did talk about it. They bragged about doing it with their friends and family who supported them while anyone who didn’t support it looked the other way because they thought it didn’t effect them. People talk, people have always talked.
Source: I’ve spent almost my entire life living in the Southern US. My grandfather’s generation was basically pure evil and open about what they did. They also raised the Trumpists with their moral perversion.
Yeah, racism being well hidden is a much more modern phenomenon. Back then, getting away with it was more about the white people who disagreed looking the other way. Kind of like transphobia or homophobia now.
Yup, good point. White people who were involved and related definitely also knew about police brutality, they just didn’t narrate it as police brutality, but rather as righteous behaviors.