You not know the history of point of these auctions, they didn’t want anyone to bid after the opening bid.
Banks would foreclose on someone’s place, and force them to auction off everything that they owned. The community would band together to buy everything back, for as close to a penny per item as possible, then give everything back to the person who the bank took it from.
While this era overlapped with Jim Crow and the heyday of the KKK, the goal of a penny auction was to enable the original owner/farmer to clear his debts and re-buy/keep his farm. While they wouldn’t have wanted any black person bidding either, there wasn’t any likelihood of that happening. This was white-on-white threats of violence, against wealthy men greedy for more.
The nooses were probably quite off-putting to other kinds of people they might not want bidding too…
You not know the history of point of these auctions, they didn’t want anyone to bid after the opening bid.
Banks would foreclose on someone’s place, and force them to auction off everything that they owned. The community would band together to buy everything back, for as close to a penny per item as possible, then give everything back to the person who the bank took it from.
That wasn’t the point at all here.
While this era overlapped with Jim Crow and the heyday of the KKK, the goal of a penny auction was to enable the original owner/farmer to clear his debts and re-buy/keep his farm. While they wouldn’t have wanted any black person bidding either, there wasn’t any likelihood of that happening. This was white-on-white threats of violence, against wealthy men greedy for more.