In 2018, a black supervisor at a GM plant in Ohio reported five nooses hung in his work area over several months. One of his white staffers told him, "back in the day, you would have been buried with a shovel."
That same year, a man in Riverside, California, was videotaped hanging a noose on the fence between his house and the house of a mixed-race couple.
In September, a white high school student put a noose around the neck of a black classmate in Ouachita, Louisiana.
In October, a retired firefighter in Grapevine, Texas, hung a doll by the neck on the railing in front of a black neighbor's apartment in an attempt to intimidate the family.
Lynching may seem like something out of the distant past, but the use of lynching symbolism to terrify, intimidate and curtail the lives of black Americans is very much happening today, say civil rights advocates.
Search the word "noose" in Google News and 18 pages of returns appear, most describing recent instances where the ominous and iconic hangman's knotted rope was used to incite fear. The stories have largely remained local news.
That changed Tuesday when assailants in Chicago allegedly attacked “Empire” star Jussie Smollett, yelling racist and homophobic slurs, punching him in the face, pouring bleach on him and wrapping a rope around his neck.
'Empire' star attack:Jussie Smollett case: Police search for persons of interest in Chicago
Just as in the less-reported incidents, that rope carried with it a chilling and violent message, hearkening back to more than a hundred years of murder and intimidation as lynching was used to keep African-Americans from claiming their civil rights and even basic human freedoms after the end of slavery in the United States.
The symbolism of the noose has continued to be used by racists, though for a time it became less common. That appears to be changing, with an increase in racist and xenophobic attacks by people who appear emboldened since the election of President Donald Trump, say civil rights groups.
In Smollett’s case, the attackers allegedly yelled, “This is MAGA country,” an allusion to Trump’s campaign slogan “Make America Great Again.”
“This particular president of the United States seems to be more tolerant of those who would buy into a more discriminatory ideology, in some cases almost telling them that it’s OK to do these things,” said Hilary O. Shelton, director of the NAACP’s Washington, D.C., bureau.
Congress has yet to enact a law making lynching a federal crime, though the Senate did unanimously pass the Justice for Lynching Act in December.
“For over a century, members of Congress have attempted to pass some version of a bill that would recognize lynching for what it is: a bias-motivated act of terror. And for more than a century, and more than 200 attempts, this body has failed,” Democratic Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey said at the introduction of the legislation.
Because the House did not vote on the bill before the 2018 congressional session ended, Democratic Sen. Kamala Harris of California and Booker plan to reintroduce the legislation within the next two weeks, her office said.
“What happened to Jussie Smollett was an attempted modern-day lynching. No one should have to fear for their life because of their sexual orientation or color of their skin. The Justice for Victims of Lynching Act is needed now more than ever," Harris said in a statement to USA TODAY. She and Booker plan to reintroduce the bill in the coming weeks. Harris is running to become the first black woman president in 2020.
There are no statistics available on the number of hate crimes involving nooses or lynching imagery in the United States. But hate crimes overall are increasing. Hate crimes spiked 17 percent in 2017, according to FBI statistics.
Trump's rhetoric "has unleashed our demons," said Heidi Beirich, director of the intelligence project at the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama.
Since launching his run for the White House, Trump has called Mexicans rapists, referred to Haiti and African nations as "shithole countries" and self-identified as a "nationalist."
In all, 7,175 hate incidents were voluntarily reported in 2017, up from 6,121 in the previous year. Almost 60 percent of them were based on the person's race or ethnicity. It was the third year in a row the numbers rose.
Civil rights leaders say the true number of hate attacks are likely much higher, in part because the FBI numbers are based on reporting from local jurisdictions and not all police departments track hate crimes. FBI Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein said in November that 88 percent of law enforcement agencies that provide hate crime data to the FBI's Uniform Crime Report reported none in 2016.
“We’re not capturing more than 5 percent of the racial violence that happens in this country,” estimates Beirich.
Terror and intimidation
Jack Shuler, a professor of black studies at Denison University in Ohio and author of "The Thirteenth Turn: A History of the Noose," tracks lynching-related incidents. He says he’s seen an uptick since 2016.
“I thought for a while they were kind of petering out, but definitely after Trump was elected we’ve been seeing more of them,” he said.
In the years after the Civil War, lynching became a standard tactic to provoke fear in African-American communities, to keep them from voting or demanding their rights or even from running a business that might threaten a white person’s earning abilities.
Lynching wasn’t just hanging. “People were mutilated, tortured. Burned alive. It’s a horrible history,” said Shuler.
A study by the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama, documented more than 4,384 lynchings between the end of Reconstruction in 1877 and in 1950. In 2018, the group opened the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which honors lynching victims.
“The most visceral racist images in American history are the noose and the burning cross. White supremacists have used them to intimate and oppress black people since the founding of this country," said Beirich. "There’s just no mistaking what a noose means.”
The message is never lost on those at whom it is aimed. While he was researching his book, Shuler interviewed several people who had nooses used to intimidate them at work. One was Michael McKnight, who in 2010 was the first black person to work at General Cage, a factory that manufactures pet cages in Elwood, Indiana.
Seven days after he began, a noose was hung on the factory’s time clock.
"When I talked to him, he said, 'I pictured myself with that noose around my neck, hanging from a tree,'" Shuler said.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2019/01/31/attack-empire-star-jussie-smollett-shows-rise-lynching-symbolism/2719869002/
2019-01-31 12:35:00Z
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