The Ugly Truth of a Hanging Noose

There's a glaring omission in most of the Jena Six stories, and the silence shrouds an ugly part of American history that most of us would like to forget.

Reporters frequently note that as many as three nooses were found dangling on a schoolyard tree in Jena, La., but there was virtually no mention of what those crude circles of rope symbolize. Nobody, it seems, wants to summon the horrific images of the past, which may help to explain why copycat nooses are now popping up at other schools across the country.

Between 1882 and 1944, at least 3,400 black men were lynched in the United States. That's an average of one human being a week.

Historians say lynching began in the 1770s as a vigilante response to local criminals and political opponents. It was institutionalized in the South in the late 1860s to fight emancipation and Reconstruction. Author Philip Dray, in his book "At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America," wrote that "lynching became the means of killing any African-American whose status, actions or attitudes challenged white supremacy."

The victims usually were tortured and castrated and often set on fire in front of cheering crowds before they were hoisted up by a rope and left swinging from tree branches, lamp posts or utility poles.

A newspaper reporter in Anadarko, Okla., described the 1913 lynching of Bennie Simmons. He was dragged from his jail cell, soaked in coal oil and set on fire before the goons hung him from a cottonwood tree. "The Negro prayed and shrieked in agony as the flames reached his flesh," wrote the reporter, "but his cries were drowned out by yells and jeers of the mob." The men who killed him made no attempt to hide their identities, but not one of them was ever prosecuted.

Frequently, the dead bodies were photographed for gruesome souvenir postcards that were mailed and exchanged like baseball cards. James Allen collected more than a hundred of these for the book "Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America." One of the cards, titled "The Lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith," from 1930 in Marion, Ind., was double-matted and framed for the walls of someone's home.

Locks of the victims' hair were flattened under the glass.

The 1911 image of John Lee in Durant, Okla., was marketed as a "Coon Cooking." Five years later, a dutiful son named Joe mailed a card displaying the charred corpse of Jesse Washington with this inscription on the back: "This is the barbecue we had last night."

Our reluctance to talk about this gruesome past has fueled the notion that a noose hung in 2007 is just a misguided practical joke. Authorities now insist that the nooses in Jena were unrelated to the subsequent beating of a white boy by six black students. But the boys who hung the nooses weren't severely punished, and reports of nooses are now cropping up at other schools.

Several nooses have appeared at schools in North Carolina. A cadet and an instructor were targeted at the Coast Guard Academy in New London, Conn. At the University of Maryland in College Park, a noose hung from a tree just outside the Nyumburu Cultural Center. Nyumburu is Swahili for "freedom house."

Meanwhile, a neo-Nazi in Roanoke, Va., posted a threatening blog littered with racial slurs. If the Jena Six are released, he wrote, "we will find out where they live and make sure that white activists and white citizens in Louisiana know it. We'll mail directions to their homes to every white man in Louisiana if we have to in order to find someone willing to deliver justice."

His brand of justice is a lynching.

A circle of rope hanging from a tree is never a prank, but it is a call to action for every history teacher in the country. From middle school to college, these gatekeepers to our past should interrupt their lesson plans for a day and force their students -- and our children -- to think about a time not so long ago.

A time when murder was entertainment, when racism was a creed and when the America we want to love was a country we just want to forget.

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and the author of two books from Random House: "Life Happens" and "… and His Lovely Wife." To find out more about Connie Schultz (cschultz@plaind.com) and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.
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