Lynching has
been on my mind a great deal these days. As we
consider that unaddressed legacy of racial
violence in our history, America is at a
crossroads. White supremacists and Christian
nationalists want us to forget our troubled
and troubling history that could bring
discomfort. Just to demystify this war on
books, on history, on diversity, equity and
inclusion and so-called critical race theory,
the whole point of it all is to erase our
memory and purge the historical record so that
the neo-Jim Crow fascists may continue to
commit these crimes for the purpose of
maintaining straight-white-male-Christian
supremacy.
History and
the present are inextricably linked. Carolyn
Bryant Donham - the white woman who accused
Black teen Emmett
Till of
making sexual advances toward her, leading to
his horrific lynching in Mississippi in 1955 -
died at the age of 88 without facing justice.
I do not believe in Hell, but if I did, I
would most certainly conclude Donham was sent
there with gasoline drawers, or drawls as the
elders would say.
Emmett
Till’s murder reminds me of “Strange Fruit” -
that chilling song written by Abel Meeropol
that Billie Holliday sang so well. Then
there’s “Mississippi Goddam,” the
Nina Simone song that captured the hot mess
that was Mississippi in 1963, amid the murder
of Medgar Evers, the violence against the
Freedom Riders and the bombing of the 16th
Street Baptist Church that killed four little
Black girls in Birmingham - also known as
Bombingham - Alabama.
On May 19,
1918 - 105 years ago - a white Georgia mob
lynched Mary
Turner, a Black woman
who was 8-months pregnant, for speaking out
against the lynching of her husband the day
before. The mob bound and tied Turner, doused
her with gasoline and set her on fire, cut the
baby out of her belly, stomped and killed the
baby, and riddled Turner’s body with bullets.
And on May 31, 1921, the Black
community of Greenwood, Oklahoma was decimated
in the Tulsa Race Massacre. Hundreds of Black
women, children and men were lynched, and
today they are still unearthing the bodies
secretly buried in mass graves.
Meanwhile, fast-forward to
today, and we are told that white supremacist
domestic terrorism is the greatest threat to
national security. Of course, white supremacy
has been the greatest threat to Black lives
for over 400 years.
The Biden
administration plans to combat antisemitism through
understanding history, and examples such as
the 1915 lynching of Leo Frank. Frank, an
Atlanta pencil factory owner was falsely
accused, prosecuted and convicted of murdering 13-year-old
factory worker named Mary Phagan. A white
lynchmob kidnapped Frank from a jail cell and
hanged him.
This,
as a series of public lynchings and
circumstantial lynchings of Black people take
place in the twenty-first century. In
Mississippi, the decapitated remains of Rasheem
Carter,
25 were found after he had complained to his
mother that white men had been chasing him.
Jordan Neely, an unhoused and traumatized
young Black man, was choked to death by a
White man in the New York City subway. His
crime - being hungry and thirsty, with mental
health challenges and in need of assistance.
Many have cried out in mourning for Jordan
Neely, and yet, his public lynching was
celebrated by many. In a nation built on land
theft, kidnapping and forced labor, White
colonial settlers do what they do, and that is
keep this game going. White supremacy always
ends in death, and maintaining white supremacy
invariably involves physical violence and the
taking of life - to make an example of folks
in ritual fashion.
There are
two haunting images that capture how society
reacts to the lynching of Black people in
America. The first is a political cartoon
published in Harper’s
Weekly in
1876 on the eve of the presidential election.
Titled, “In Self-Defense,” the cartoon depicts
a white man, a former Confederate holding a
smoking gun in one hand and a knife in the
other, kneeling over a Black child he had just
killed. The caption reads: “SOUTHERN
CHIV.: ‘Ef I hadn't-er killed you, you would
hev growed up to rule me.’”
The cartoon was attacking the
notion of Southern chivalry and the use of
racial violence and lynchings to affirm White
domination, and captured the White Southern
fear of “Black rule” under the post-Civil War
Reconstruction era.
The second
image is a photo of the
lynching of Rubin
Stacy, who was
lynched on July 19, 1935 in Fort Lauderdale,
Florida for “threatening and frightening a
white woman.” The photo shows Stacy’s corpse
hanging from a tree, with cleanly-dressed
White people, as if going to church, standing
around the lynched man. Attention centers
around the seven-year-old White girl who, with
arms crossed, stares at Stacy and smiles. Why
was she smiling? And what did she take from
the experience?
At the time,
lynchings were entertainment spectacles and
excursions designed to keep Black people in
their place and under White control. Tickets
were sold, photos were taken and turned into postcards, and body
parts were sliced up and kept as lovely
souvenirs.
Meanwhile, as the Klan and
vigilantes under Jim Crow meted out anti-Black
violence in the streets, the legal, political
and business interests did their part to
render a civil death to Black people through
voter disenfranchisement and imprisonment.
Kind of sounds like today,
doesn’t it?
