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Vol. 8 Issue 24…Dedicated
to the Dialogue on Race…June 17, 2005
Intuit’s Vibe
On "Lynching
Song"
By Onwucheka Jemie
Most lynchings are for rape. But, it is common knowledge that in
the South it is extremely rare that a black man has actually raped or attempted
to rape a white woman. In the South, sexual contact between black men and white
women, from slavery times to the present, has almost always been initiated by
the white woman. And every black man in the South knows that if he is unlucky
enough to become the object of a white woman's affections, he must leave town
or die.
When a white woman invites you to love, you are doomed. If you
accept and it is found out, as it will sooner or later, she will cry rape, and
you will be lynched. If you refuse, she will in humiliation and revenge cry
rape, and you will be lynched.
The rape-and-lynch psychosis must be viewed in the context of the
perverted sexual mythology whereby white Americans first reduced black people
to sub-humans, then invested them with a hyper-sexuality, forced access of
white males to black females, blocked access of black males to white females,
and proceeded to project white lust and puritan guilt onto black males and
victimize them for the sins of white males.
For Southern white men to publicly admit that in liaisons with
black men, Southern white women are usually willing accomplices, most often the
provocateurs, is for them to lose control of reality as they wish to know it.
Instead, that secret knowledge drives them even more rabidly violent. It is
this psychological cat and mouse game that gives a poem like
"Silhouette" (by Langston Hughes) its ironic power: "Southern
gentle lady, Do not swoon. They've just hung a black man...." (Source:
From Langston Hughes: An Introduction to the Poetry (1976), Columbia
University Press www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/)
Apology for Lynching
On January 20, 1900, North Carolina Rep. George H. White
introduced the first bill to make lynching a federal crime. Thanks to Ida B.
Wells, who compiled the first statistics on lynching and debunked the notion
that they were justified because black men were raping white women, White had a
good idea of the number of men and women that had died as a result of this
barbaric practice.
As documented by James Allen's "Without Sanctuary: Lynching
Photography in America," we know lynchings were popular and festive public
events attended by entire families. Nearly 5,000 people were lynched between
1880-1960. Their brutal deaths were picnics, family outings, where pictures
were taken and souvenirs, body parts, were collected as mementos of the
occasions.
More than one hundred years too late, the US Senate finally
acknowledged its mistake. On June 13, 2005, it formally apologized for failing
to pass legislation that would have made lynching a federal offense. The
resolution passed 80-20; 17 Republicans and 3 Democrats did not support the
measure. Several anti-lynching bills that passed in the House of
Representatives, but failed in the Senate, would have allowed the federal
government to prosecute everyone responsible for a lynching, including local
law enforcement officials.
Often, local law officials were the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). KKK
members were respected and well-known in their communities. Some officials led
the mob, sympathized with it and provided assistance or offered no resistance to
the mob action in violation of the intended victims' constitutional and human
rights.
Southern conservative Democrats in the Senate used the filibuster
to prevent passage of anti-lynching legislation. Ironically, in a case of
trading places, the conservative mind-set that blocked passage of anti-lynching
legislation now dominates the Republican Party.
Lynching (Excerpt)
By
Lizelia Augusta Jenkins Moorer (1907)
Have
you ever heard of lynching in the great United States?
'Tis
an awful, awful story that the Negro man relates,
How
the mobs the laws have trampled, both the human and divine,
In
their killing helpless people as their cruel hearts incline.
Not the heathen! 'Tis the Christian with the Bible in his hand,
Stands for pain and death to tyrannize the weaklings of the land;
Not the red man nor the Spaniard kills the blacks of Uncle Sam,
'Tis the white man of the nation who will lunch the sons of Ham.
To a limb upon the highway does a Negro's body hang,
Riddled with a hundred bullets from the bloody, thirsty gang;
Law and order thus defying, and there's none to say them nay.
"Thus," they say, to keep their power, "Negroes must be kept at
bay."
How his back is lacerated! How the scene is painted red,
By the blood of one poor Negro till he numbers with the dead!
Listen to the cry of anguish from a soul that God has made,
But it fails to reach the pity of the demons in the raid.
To a tree we find the Negro and to him a chain beside,
There a horse to it is fastened and the whip to him applied.
Thus he pulls the victim's body till it meets a dying fate,
And to history is given a new scandal to relate.
Limb from limb he's torn asunder! See the savage lynchers grin!
Then the flesh is cut in pieces and the souvenirs begin;
Each must have the piece allotted for the friends at home to see,
Relatives will cluster round him, laughing, dancing, filled with glee.
To a stake they bind the Negro, pile the trash around him high,
Make the fire about his body; it is thus that he must die.
Burn him slowly, hear the lynchers: "That's the part we most enjoy!
Tell it out in all the nation how we killed a Negro boy!"
Savage mob a Negro's chasing, and to catch him must not fail;
If it does, another's taken, there to force from him the tale
Where the fleeing man is hiding; if the facts he cannot raise,
Though his innocence protesting, for the same by death he pays.
"'Tis a Negro's blood we're craving; such will have at any cost;
We
must lynch the one in keeping, for the other one is lost!"
This they say, and when they're questioned answer like this is the why,
"To the race at large a warning here a Negro man shall die!"
O, how brave the Southern white man when, a hundred men to one,
Lynch a lone, defenceless Negro, when each lyncher has a gun.
If at midnight or the noonday, the result is all the same,
Law is powerless to hinder, and the nation shares the blame.
Lynchers go into the Senate and their savagery uphold,
How they shoot and butcher Negroes is the story that is told.
Guns and ropes they have in plenty, and, if necessary, will
Use them on an office holder, such a Negro they must kill.
How they clamor for the Philippines and Cubans far away,
While a worse thing is transpiring in this country every day.
In the eyes of such law-breakers lives a beam of greatest size,
That will hinder all the pulling of the mote from others' eyes.
Are the candidates for lynching always found among the men?
No, the fiends of human torture lynch a woman now and then.
Yea, the Spanish Inquisition insignificant will pale,
When compared with such atrocities that in the South prevail!
'Tis a blot on Christian manhood time, itself, cannot erase;
Human blood upon the conscience centuries cannot efface.
Simply to suspect a Negro is sufficient for the band,
He must die without a hearing, in a boasted gospel land.
Sowing antedates the reaping, and the nation should beware,
That the sowers to the wind will reap the whirlwind everywhere.
Hark the cry! the blood of Negroes cries for vengeance from the dust!
How I tremble for the nation when I think that God is just!
About Me: Lynching comes from Prejudice
Unveiled And Other Poems by Lizelia Augusta Jenkins Moorer. A black
American, she taught at the Normal School, Chaflin College, Orangeburg, South
Carolina (1895-99) and instructed second-grade in the Grammar School.
Duluth Lynching (1920)
On June 14, 1920, the John Robinson Circus, which traveled by
train, arrived in Duluth, Minnesota to the cheers of an eager crowd. The
scheduled circus stop included one day of performances and a street parade. A
young white couple, Irene Tusken (19) and James Sullivan (18), attended the
evening performance.
The next day, Sullivan's father informed Duluth Police Chief John
Murphy that six black circus workers had held the pair at gunpoint and raped
Tusken. The circus employed a number of young black men as cooks and laborers.
As the circus train left Duluth, police detained 120 blacks with little
evidence to corroborate the couple's claims. With no physical evidence of rape
or assault, six blacks were arrested, based on Tusken's description of size and
shape, rather than facial features.
Reported in the local paper, news of alleged rape spread rapidly.
On the evening of June 15, a white mob, estimated between 1,000 and 10,000
people, gathered outside the police station. With police under orders not to
shoot, the mob broke into the jail and pulled the men from their cells. After a
mock trial, Isaac McGhie (20) Elmer Jackson (19) and Elias Clayton (19) were
declared guilty. The men were brutally beaten and lynched at the corner of
First Street and Second Avenue East.
The Minnesota National Guard arrived the next day to secure Duluth
and protect the surviving prisoners. On June 17, District Judge William Cant
convened a grand jury. Given sympathies ran high for whites that were
"seen as merely caught in the moment and giving into the mob
mentality," identifying the leaders and instigators of the lynch mob proved
difficult. However, the grand jury handed down thirty-seven indictments for
rioting and murder in the first degree.
Three whites were convicted of rioting. Each served less than
fifteen months in prison. No one was convicted of murdering McGhie, Jackson and
Clayton. Seven blacks were indicted by the grand jury for rape. Charges were
dismissed against five. The remaining two, Max Mason and William Miller, were
tried for rape. Miller was acquitted, and Mason was convicted and sentenced to
seven to thirty years in prison. In 1925, the Minnesota Parole Board discharged
Mason from prison with the condition that he leave the state.
In 1991, the unmarked graves of McGhie, Jackson and Clayton were
discovered in the Park Hill Cemetery. On October 26, 1991, their graves were marked
with headstones bearing their names and the inscription "Deterred but not
defeated." In 2003, a monument dedicated to them was unveiled. (Sources: www.aaregistry.com
and http://collections.mnhs.org/duluthlynchings/)
Contemporary Texas Lynching
When it comes to racism, colorism or whatever contemporary
euphemism used to identify discrimination based on skin color in the USA, the
past is ever present. While it is politically correct to talk about lynching as
if it was something that tragically happened a long time ago, lynching never
ended. Quite frankly, the attitudes that fostered this kind of domestic
terrorism never changed.
Sure, the overt signs of racism have been taken down, laws have
been passed criminalizing certain acts, blacks can register to vote without
fear of being killed, etc., but these things have not changed the hearts of
men. And, as the contemporary lynching of Billy Ray Johnson shows in Linden,
Texas and elsewhere in the USA, black men are still publicly called
"boys" where the n-word is politically incorrect and, if caught in
the wrong place with the wrong group, black men are subject to be lynched.
On September 27, 2003, a group of young white men picked up
mentally challenged Johnson, age 42, and drove him to a cow pasture where other
young white people were having a party. The object of ridicule, threatened with
the Ku Klux Klan and subjected to racial slurs, Johnson was knocked unconscious
and dumped on a mound of fire ants. One of the party's participants, James
Hicks, a guard at the Cass County jail, returned to the scene several hours
later and called the local sheriff. Johnson survived the ordeal, but will never
be the same.
The evidence suggests this was a hate crime, but federal charges
were not filed against Johnson's attackers. They were convicted of assault and
injury to a disabled person; the jury recommended suspended sentences and
probation. Under his authority to impose additional jail time, District Judge
Ralph Burgess sentenced three of the four men to one month in jail and Hicks to
two months.
Unfortunately, many whites see this incident as simply a case of
"good ole boys" drinking too much-- certainly not as a crime. In the
words of Wilford Penny (73), a former Linden major, ".... The black boy
was somewhere he shouldn't have been, although they brought him out
there." (Chicago Tribune, June 5, 2005)
Disgruntled
says: A sick refrain, black men are killed in police custody, routine
traffic stops or found swinging from trees, water towers and other high spots.
Generally ruled suicide, these strange fruits are invariably found to have been
dating white women. In 2004, they found Bernard Burden swinging from an old oak
in Grantville, Georgia; Burden was dating a white woman. While Burden was found
hanging in the deep South, black men dying under unusual circumstances is not a
southern phenomenon. Similar stories are told across the USA from the northeast
to the southwest. A poor reading of contemporary conditions, it is assumed
lynching ended, at the very latest, in the 1970s. So, nobody keeps statistics
on these strange deaths and beatings. The Ku Klux Klan may no longer parade
down Pennsylvania Avenue, but most black folks know, lynching is alive and
well, and will rear its ugly head Anywhere, USA.
Disgruntled
wants to know:
Over the past weekend, the first tropical storm of the season and the missing
Alabama teenager in Aruba, along with speculation about the Michael Jackson
trial verdict dominated mainstream media attention. In fact, either story
received more media coverage than the Downing Street memorandum, which claims
facts and intelligence were fixed to justify the use of military force to
effect regime change in Iraq. Unlike a single missing person or the potential
damage from a storm, thousands have died, many thousands more have been
wounded, some crippled mentally and physically for life, billions of dollars
have been borrowed and spent to prosecute a war based on lies about the threat
Iraq posed to the US and its allies. The near absence of US media coverage is
more evidence that the US corporate-owned media work in tandem with the
government, making a lie out of the notion of a free press. Now that the storm
has passed and the Jackson trial has ended in acquittal, what non-story will US
media use to fill its pages and broadcast airtime?
Disgruntled feels: Division! The evidence is
crystal clear; George W. Bush, who initially campaigned for president of the US
as a uniter that would change the political climate in Washington, has
succeeded as none other in creating craters where mere hairline fractures
existed before his installation. With his domestic approval rating tumbling and
the nation's reputation tanking, Bush can be clearly categorized as a divider.
His domestic policies favor the wealthy at the expense of the middle class and
poor. To muzzle critics, his talking heads accuse anyone that dares to mention
the obvious of engaging in class warfare. His foreign policy, which recently
changed to spreading democracy, is best expressed by his motto, "You're
either with us or against us," which leaves no quarter for dissension or
compromise among sovereign nations. Under Bush, US actions from war to prisoner
detention and abuse require a steady diet of diplomacy, yet with everything set
in concrete, there is no room for negotiations. Whether domestic or foreign
policy, there is only division.
Mailbox, E-Mails, Faxes and Telephone Calls
E-mail CWMeb@aol.com
: Re: Hood Notes...The Watergate Scandal...On June 17, 1972, burglars broke
into the Democratic Party's National Committee offices located in the Watergate
Hotel, a deluxe hotel-apartment complex in Washington, DC. Thanks to security
guard Frank Mills. The correct name is WILLS (not Mills).
Email alarkam@webtv.net:
JP Morgan Chase, which acquired Bank One, is creating a $5 million college
scholarship fund in Louisiana to make amends for the role that two of its
predecessor banks played in the slave trade in the state. In its merger with
Bank One, JP Morgan Chase acquired assets from two defunct New Orleans-area
banks -- Citizens Bank and Canal Bank -- that accepted slaves as collateral on
loans from plantation owners in the 1800s. In a letter to JP Morgan Chase's
120,000 employees, the company's top two officers apologized for the
slavery-era activities of the two banks.
Email www.wachovia.com:
Earlier this year, Wachovia contracted with The History Factory, a leading
historical research firm, to conduct research on the predecessor institutions
that, over many years, formed our company. Researchers determined that the
Georgia Railroad and Banking Company owned at least 162 slaves, and the Bank of
Charleston accepted at least 529 slaves as collateral on mortgaged properties
or loans, and acquired an undetermined number of these individuals when
customers defaulted on their loans. We are deeply saddened by these findings.
We apologize to all Americans, especially African-Americans and people of
African descent. We cannot change the past; we cannot make up for the wrongs of
slavery, but we can learn from our past and begin a stronger dialogue about
slavery and the experience of African-Americans in our country, their unique
struggles, triumphs and contributions.
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