Bill Cosby wasn't 'lynched'

Throughout our history, African-American men were lynched after being accused of sexually assaulting white women. Bill Cosby is an African-American man, and most of the women he is accused of sexually assaulting were white.

Ergo, Bill Cosby was lynched.

That's the twisted logic behind the latest defense of Cosby, who was convicted last week of drugging and molesting a woman 14 years ago. The trial also featured testimony from five other women who claimed they had been assaulted by him.

And that made it into a "public lynching," Cosby spokesman Andrew Wyatt told a TV interviewer. Another Cosby representative compared the Philadelphia-born entertainer to Emmett Till, the 14-year-old African-American who was killed in Mississippi in 1955 after allegedly making crude comments to a white woman.

Please. By claiming that Cosby was lynched, even metaphorically, his apologists do a grave injustice to the 4,100 African-Americans who were actually lynched between 1877 and 1950. For black Americans, lynching wasn't a metaphor; it was fact of life, and of death.

Consider the fate of Henry Smith, a black man who was accused of raping and murdering a young white girl in Paris, Texas in 1893. According to historian Joel Williamson, who drew on contemporary accounts of the event, Smith was tied to a stake atop a 10-foot-high platform that was erected outside of town. A crowd of 10,000 gathered there, with the help of special trains that were commissioned to transport spectators to the event.

The father of the murdered girl scaled the platform to take his revenge. Using irons that had been heated white in a furnace, he thrust them under Smith's feet. Then he moved upwards to the rest of Smith's body. "By turns Smith screamed, prayed, begged and cursed his torturer," one account reported. "When his face was reached, his tongue was silenced by fire, and henceforth he only moaned ... Not a finger's breadth of his body being unscathed, his executioners gave way."

Then the platform was soaked with oil and lit on fire, which finally extinguished Henry Smith. The event was memorialized in photographs and also in a Graphophone record, which preserved Smith's cries. The next day, people raked the ashes and took his bones and teeth for relics.

That's what a real lynching was like.