When Leo Frank, a New York Jew, was unlawfully lynched in 1915 by a mob in Georgia, Josephus Daniels, then Secretary of Navy, called it “the worst blot” on the history of the state of Georgia. The Brooklyn Eagle called it the act of “a mob of barbarians who have brought their civilization to a standstill”. The Evening Post declared, “Let a society be founded…with the specific aim of stamping out lynching.”
92-years later, the lynching noose is back in the public eye.
Most recently it appeared on the office door of a black professor at Columbia University’s Teacher’s College and hanging from a lamppost of a post office by Ground Zero. In the month of September alone, it appeared at a Long Island police department, a high school in North Carolina, and the black cultural studies center at the University of Maryland.
This past summer, nooses were also found among the personal belongings of a student, black, and an instructor, white, at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy in Connecticut.
A year ago, three nooses were hung at a high school in Jena, Louisiana, a racially charged township which has been the center of the “Jena 6″ affair.
That these nooses have surfaced, specifically, at our academic and civil institutions is most disconcerting, and further, begs the question — haven’t we learned anything?
Do those perpetrating these acts, and perhaps more importantly, those who have witnessed it, know anything about the noose and its historical implications?
The noose represents a shameful and frightening part of our country’s past, when segregation, discrimination and brutal violence against African-Americans were common.
Beating and lynching blacks in public spaces, as a means to intimidate, terrorize, and maintain a racially determined social order, was the ugliest layer of Jim Crow injustice.
But the details of this era are lost to historical memory, and it is unlikely that most Americans know of the lynching of sixteen-year old Emmett Till in 1955, or James Byrd Jr. as recently as 1998.
Unfortunately, discussions about these recent acts – an affront to African-Americans and all Americans – have become politicized, and this distracts us from what lies behind them.
Those who hang nooses, after all, could just as easily burn a cross or scrawl a swastika.
Hate symbols threaten more than the targeted group – they poison civil society, creating an atmosphere of apprehension and fear, threatening to divide.
Skeptics wonder what difference community rallies and public outrage can make. Indeed, grandstanding alone does not sufficiently address distorted or forgotten history.
Remembrance is passive unless accompanied by collective action.
As we learned from the residents of Billings, Montana, when an entire community comes together to say “Not in our town,” the possibilities for peaceful coexistence are limitless.
Community institutions, educators, clergy, politicians, media, and business leaders must discuss the potential implications of such symbolic acts and educate newer generations about the disgraceful, but all too real moments in American history when racist perception and practice trampled our founding ideals.
The resources do exist. Consider the exhibit that turned into a book, Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America. It documents up to 100 photographic prints and postcards, dating from about 1870 to 1960, that evidence the history of lynching in the U.S.
School programs, like Facing History and Ourselves, and online learning tools, such as those of the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia, based in Michigan; and the series The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow build social awareness and make a difference.
America has come a long way, but our nation today faces both old and new challenges with its increasing ethnic, religious, and cultural diversity. It was, after all, only in 2005 that the Senate formally apologized for its failure in previous decades to enact a federal anti-lynching law.
That we are witnessing the reappearance of the noose in our day is shameful. It’s a warning of what happens when we don’t assert the values of pluralism.
Isra Yaghoubi is AJC’s assistant director at the Belfer Center for American Pluralism.
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Your points above are well taken. In addition to the noose representing, as you note, “a shameful and frightening part of our country’s past,” it is also a sad reminder of the present state of the country. It’s both ironic and completely symptomatic of the American inability to transcend prejudice that the noose (one of many, we must sadly acknowledge — I’m sure this is merely one that received more press) appeared at a university campus.
When you say collective action should be taken but you hit upon what is a complex psychological phenomenon.
Some are quick to say a swastika on a door or a noose is a teenager who is just having fun or someone who has bad taste. They say it’s someone who needs attention. They say that drawing attention to it not only is an act of hyper-sensitivity but actually encourages more acts of that fashion.
Either it is a defense mechanism or those who feel that way may be stuck in the malaise of their own naivete.
Concrete responses are needed. Expectations must be higher and you have to wonder what specifically is promting the nooses.
At a time when a Jew may become attorney general, and woman and an African American are vying for the White House, perhaps we will see the unfortunate awakening of an underlying bastion of intolerance that has remained somewhat dormant or at least not brazenly demonstrated. Hopefully it’s not the case. Lastly, we must not think that as long as there’s no noose or cross on my lawn or no swastika on my house, it doesn’t matter. It should be considered a plague on all our houses.
For those who may not know or remember the events in Billings, this site tells the story.
http://www.pbs.org/niot/about/niot1.html
The most recent othering has been against immigrants, all the old stuff of being different and not fitting in and undermining America and not knowing their place (which is hidden in the garden or the kitchen). And the supporters of anti-immigrant organizations are– surprise, surprise — the same people who speak the language of racism, anti-semitism and hate. So the battle has just begun, again.
It’s astonishing that, at the beginning of the 21st Century, in a country with the most resources and with free basic education for all, there are still human beings who are so ruled by their fear, which is fed by ignorance which feeds back the fear, that the result is these vile, cowardly displays.
There is progress; we are, in the main, becoming civilized, and yet there are still those who cannot let go of their terror of those whose humanity they share, but whose characteristics of race or religion or sexual orientation differ. Unfortunately many of these fearful creatures are in our government and our religious insitutions–not the majority, but enough to wage false wars and to proscribe behaviors not because they are wrong, but because they are different. It’s difficult to understand how, especially when there are still plenty of people alive and of good minds to remember World War II and the civil rights movement, that the message of tolerance that is the core of our country had not reached yet into all the corners of the land.
Mohandas Ghandi was asked “What do you think of Western Civilization?” The Mohatma replied, “I think it would be a good idea.”
In all due respect to how painful it must be for African Americans to see such an ugly symbol, a college prankster placing a noose outside of a professor’s office has no more relevance to the ugly racist lynchings of the past than a swastika scrawled on kid’s locker in a public high school has to the horrors of Nazi Germany.
One of the reasons I read this blog (and AJC’s former publication: Commentary) is due to its in-depth analysis - w/ context, proportion, and empirical evidence - on the moral issues facing the Jewish community and the world at large, and I really think that by elevating isolated incidents to the level of more systemic and widespread problems you lower yourselves to the banalities of the mainstream media.
I was only aware of the Teachers College incident, which was down the street from where I have class. It was a real affront to the community. I can’t believe that people like that still exist. It makes you lose your faith in progress.
Some statistics about reading in the US (one of the most intellectually developed countries in history)
1/3 of high school graduates never read another book for the rest of their lives.
42 percent of college graduates never read another book after college.
80 percent of U.S. families did not buy or read a book last year.
70 percent of U.S. adults have not been in a bookstore in the last five years.
57 percent of new books are not read to completion.
70 percent of books published do not earn back their advance.
70 percent of the books published do not make a profit.
(Source: Jerold Jenkins, http://www.JenkinsGroupInc.com)
“That these nooses have surfaced, specifically, at our academic and civil institutions is most disconcerting, and further, begs the question — haven’t we learned anything?”
Those of us who read have, but we are a subset of the population.
“Do those perpetrating these acts, and perhaps more importantly, those who have witnessed it, know anything about the noose and its historical implications?”
That would have required reading, an act the perpetrators of the above crimes may or may not have been capable of.
“That we are witnessing the reappearance of the noose in our day is shameful. It’s a warning of what happens when we don’t assert the values of pluralism.”
It is also a reminder that there is not one set of values in the United States. We live in regional bubbles, and we are shocked at the constant discovery of unfamiliar strangers in what we thought was shared and homogeneous home.
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