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"Penny Auction" at a farm, with a noose as a warning to bank agents who might attempt to bid, Michigan, USA, Great Depression, 1936
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this post was submitted on 04 Apr 2026
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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.
Ironically, from what I've recently heard, Cadillac started selling to black people during the Great Depression. Now, how did black people have money during the Great Depression? Well, it's because they weren't allowed to keep their money in banks, and had it in cash instead.
Kinda like how Jews tended to be bankers and other financial staff, because other religions refused to handle moneylending. Many hypocrites hated the Jew's acquisition of wealth, when said hypocrites refused to do the work.
They didn’t refuse to be money lenders. Christians were religiously prohibited from money lending as you needed to charge usury to make a living lending money and usury is forbidden in christianity but not in judaism.
Isn't that what they said?