Philip Dray: Noose ... The true history of a resurgent symbol of hate
[Philip Dray is the author of "At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America." ]
[While the strong words of disapproval greeting stories] about nooses indicate a broad intellectual recognition that the noose, a symbol of lynching, is offensive, few Americans know the full story. The lynching of black America was not an occasional or aberrational event, the momentary outburst of an angry mob, but a sustained reign of terror visited on an entire people. It targeted blacks whose actions challenged white supremacy and killed them ritualistically, often publicly, in order to terrorize the black community at large. The threat of lynching - symbolized by the noose or the burning cross - was used to uproot black communities, suppress voting, and to intimidate blacks from acquiring land, aspiring to an education, or attaining success in business. The practice poisoned American society for generations, and left a powerful emotional legacy that many African-American families carry to this day.
"The overwhelming majority of people have never seen the glaring pictures of black people hanging in the South," notes Boston-based Nation of Islam Minister Don Muhammad. "That's a terrible thing for us who knew about these things, for a parent or a family member who actually experienced these things in their own lives."
In the 1890s, a black person was lynched almost every other day in America. Sometimes these killings were carried out furtively, in the darkness of a lonely crossroads. But at times they unfolded in elaborate picnic-like events attended by as many as 2,000 people, special excursion trains having brought eager spectators from Atlanta, New Orleans, Jacksonville, or other cities. Spectacle lynchings often surpassed religious revivals as the largest public events held in the post-Civil War South. A most gruesome entertainment, they often involved castration and were ritualized by techniques of torture and showmanship known as "lynchcraft," culminating in the hanging, shooting, or immolation of the day's victim. Once dead, the victim's body, his clothes, and even the tree or chains used in the execution were seized as souvenirs.
Most lynchings took place in the South, but they also occurred as late as the 1920s in seemingly "unlikely" places such as Duluth, Minn., and rural Pennsylvania and Indiana. While sexual assault or a related transgression was often cited as the crime necessitating a lynching, anti-lynching crusaders such as journalist Ida B. Wells and the NAACP discovered that lynchings actually grew from a wide variety of provocations - consensual interracial romances, competition over business or property, arguments over wages, and infractions such as not giving the right of way in a carriage, stealing hogs, and "acting the Big Man and Fool generally."
Lynching is not a footnote to American history, but integral to the text.
This terrible practice began under a flogging tree owned by Charles Lynch, a Revolutionary War-era magistrate in Virginia known to deal local Tories a harsh, personalized brand of justice, or "Lynch Law." For many years the term referred to nonlethal punishments such as caning or tar and feathering, but it took on its more deadly connotation in the years before the Civil War, when the South grew restive about encroaching abolitionist sentiment.
The recorded history of lynching begins in the 1880s, when newspapers such as the Chicago Tribune noted a sudden increase in the number of African-Americans being lynched in the former Confederate states. Inspired by the South's cherished tradition of extralegal "chastisements" such as duels and fistfights, as well as the custom of white "slave police," known as patrollers, most white men simply felt entitled to police and punish any black man; no courtroom was required. Lynching also served to reaffirm white supremacy in a region made anxious by a declining farm economy, young white women leaving home to enter the workforce, and a burgeoning former slave population seeking broader freedoms.
The noose as a sign of intimidation may have first appeared in voter suppression efforts during Reconstruction, the years 1865 to 1877 when Congress mandated and worked to uphold black voting and political participation in the "reconstructed" Southern states. To white "redeemers," intent on restoring "home rule," or white control, squeezing the black vote out of existence was a priority. A number of white vigilante groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan, Mississippi's White Liners, Louisiana's White League, and South Carolina's Red Shirts, rode en masse to terrorize black voters, disrupted Republican political rallies, visited isolated black settlements after dark, and fired off cannons near polling places. A noose tied to a white horseman's saddle was a warning no black misunderstood....
Read entire article at Boston Review
[While the strong words of disapproval greeting stories] about nooses indicate a broad intellectual recognition that the noose, a symbol of lynching, is offensive, few Americans know the full story. The lynching of black America was not an occasional or aberrational event, the momentary outburst of an angry mob, but a sustained reign of terror visited on an entire people. It targeted blacks whose actions challenged white supremacy and killed them ritualistically, often publicly, in order to terrorize the black community at large. The threat of lynching - symbolized by the noose or the burning cross - was used to uproot black communities, suppress voting, and to intimidate blacks from acquiring land, aspiring to an education, or attaining success in business. The practice poisoned American society for generations, and left a powerful emotional legacy that many African-American families carry to this day.
"The overwhelming majority of people have never seen the glaring pictures of black people hanging in the South," notes Boston-based Nation of Islam Minister Don Muhammad. "That's a terrible thing for us who knew about these things, for a parent or a family member who actually experienced these things in their own lives."
In the 1890s, a black person was lynched almost every other day in America. Sometimes these killings were carried out furtively, in the darkness of a lonely crossroads. But at times they unfolded in elaborate picnic-like events attended by as many as 2,000 people, special excursion trains having brought eager spectators from Atlanta, New Orleans, Jacksonville, or other cities. Spectacle lynchings often surpassed religious revivals as the largest public events held in the post-Civil War South. A most gruesome entertainment, they often involved castration and were ritualized by techniques of torture and showmanship known as "lynchcraft," culminating in the hanging, shooting, or immolation of the day's victim. Once dead, the victim's body, his clothes, and even the tree or chains used in the execution were seized as souvenirs.
Most lynchings took place in the South, but they also occurred as late as the 1920s in seemingly "unlikely" places such as Duluth, Minn., and rural Pennsylvania and Indiana. While sexual assault or a related transgression was often cited as the crime necessitating a lynching, anti-lynching crusaders such as journalist Ida B. Wells and the NAACP discovered that lynchings actually grew from a wide variety of provocations - consensual interracial romances, competition over business or property, arguments over wages, and infractions such as not giving the right of way in a carriage, stealing hogs, and "acting the Big Man and Fool generally."
Lynching is not a footnote to American history, but integral to the text.
This terrible practice began under a flogging tree owned by Charles Lynch, a Revolutionary War-era magistrate in Virginia known to deal local Tories a harsh, personalized brand of justice, or "Lynch Law." For many years the term referred to nonlethal punishments such as caning or tar and feathering, but it took on its more deadly connotation in the years before the Civil War, when the South grew restive about encroaching abolitionist sentiment.
The recorded history of lynching begins in the 1880s, when newspapers such as the Chicago Tribune noted a sudden increase in the number of African-Americans being lynched in the former Confederate states. Inspired by the South's cherished tradition of extralegal "chastisements" such as duels and fistfights, as well as the custom of white "slave police," known as patrollers, most white men simply felt entitled to police and punish any black man; no courtroom was required. Lynching also served to reaffirm white supremacy in a region made anxious by a declining farm economy, young white women leaving home to enter the workforce, and a burgeoning former slave population seeking broader freedoms.
The noose as a sign of intimidation may have first appeared in voter suppression efforts during Reconstruction, the years 1865 to 1877 when Congress mandated and worked to uphold black voting and political participation in the "reconstructed" Southern states. To white "redeemers," intent on restoring "home rule," or white control, squeezing the black vote out of existence was a priority. A number of white vigilante groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan, Mississippi's White Liners, Louisiana's White League, and South Carolina's Red Shirts, rode en masse to terrorize black voters, disrupted Republican political rallies, visited isolated black settlements after dark, and fired off cannons near polling places. A noose tied to a white horseman's saddle was a warning no black misunderstood....