Lynching: A Uniquely American Pastime
Lynching: A Uniquely American Pastime
No power was left in Negro hands.
W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America: 1860-1880
Those spirits are going to have a field day around here. Every white person in this country, if they didn’t lynch somebody themselves, then somebody in their family tree did. If you believe anything, you can believe that.
Percival Everett, Trees
White America has a point: we did take something from it. We, Black Americans, descendants of enslaved Africans, took away white America’s belief in its collective innocence. We continue to deny white America peace. Our presence reminds them of the unpleasant. The irritating. Trouble. Past and present.
A good many white Americans moved toward self-appointed patrols, mobs, the KKK. These Americans gravitated to carrying out night raids, cross burnings. Lynchings.
A sacrifice wrapped in a ritual, is, as French philosopher Rene Girard writes, “the regular exercise of ‘good’ violence.” And what is lynching? Or today’s version of shooting the Black American while riding a car, or walking, or sleeping in their homes?
In the Jim Crow era, it’s nothing like a lynching to whip a whole population into a state of euphoria since one visibly racially different victim becomes the chosen not only for committing violence, but also for the development of a discourse that advances denigrating and dehumanizing lies justifying the repetitive practice of lynching.
Ignoring the inherent violence in each perpetrator, as Girard would say, the narrative trains its followers to become actively anti-Black.
For this restoration of loss, a killing must take place.
It’s April 28, 1836, writes historian Walter Johnson, when a “free” McIntoch disembarks from the steamboat Flora in St. Louis. He crosses the levee and walks into town, and a “pair of sailors.” who are “running from the police,” pass right by him. But the lawmen see him. It’s the guilt quickly replaced by a remembrance of the ritual. What could restore the stolen peace, the innocence, interrupted by the sudden appearance of a “free” Black man, in the street, away from the plantation of old…
I see the tree. I see Deputy Sheriff George Hammond and Deputy Constable William Mull are headed toward violence because both men see it. They are reminded just enough of the unpleasant and head for McIntoch. Francis McIntoch.
McIntoch is dragged through the streets, dragged to a tree, the tree. He is chained to the tree and set ablaze.
His spirit in smoke ascended to high heaven… (Claude McKay, “The Lynching”)
What remains of McIntoch becomes, writes Johnson, “a grisly landmark in a campaign of ethnic cleansing that sought to remake St. Louis, Missouri, and the West as a ‘white man’s country,’ linking together the imperial practices of Indian removal and war to the jurisprudential annihilation of 1857 Dread Scott decisions.”
McIntoch is erased. Over 4743 Black Americans, according to the NAACP, were lynched in the US between 1882-1968.
Georgia 531
Texas 493
Mississippi 581
In 1823, Denmark Vesey and 34 of his fellow uprisers met the Charleston Hanging Tree (Oak), in South Carolina. Bennie Mitchell, Jr. and Ernest Collins were killed on the Columbus Hanging Tree (also Oak) in Texas.
Lynchings were reserved for mainly Blacks who were killed for “violating social customs or racial expectations, such as speaking to white people with less respect than what white people believed they were owed.”
This is US history. It’s world history, too.
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And little lads, lynchers that were to be,
Danced round the dreadful thing in fiendish glee. (Claude McKay, “The Lynching”)
Black Americans have survived the cruelty and brutality of anti-democratic forces, forces present at the very conception of this nation. Washington owned enslaved Blacks. Thomas Jefferson advocated for freedom and equality—while he owned Black people.
Indigenous villages were raided by grinning men, yelping and chanting, ripping open the wombs of pregnant women and battering the fetuses to death while the women watched, terrorized. So much for pro-life policies, with emphasis on families and motherhood. Whenever I hear Americans espouse a belief in justice and in equality, I listen to hear them mention the millions of Blacks who suffered the TransAtlantic Slave Trade, enslavement on plantations, and Jim Crow legislation. I hear a disconnect instead of a recognition of culpability. I hear an omission of truth about the presence of white supremacy policies, of fascism—right here in the US.
This brand of violence didn’t start with MEGA. As Everett’s Mama Z states, there are more Americans with someone in their family tree related to someone who participated in the lynching of a Black American.
Those family trees too forever linked with those others displaying strange fruits…
In Crusade for Justice: the Autobiography of Ida B. Wells, the author, activist and advocate for the end of lynching, writes that she learned what lynching was all about after three of her Memphis friends, businessmen, Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Lee Stewart became victims of “brutality” at the hands of a mob. Black men were told that they would be subject to lynching if they were found to abuse a white woman in any way. But her three friends “had committed no crime against white women.”
The deaths of Moss, McDowell, and Stewart opened her eyes, writes Wells, to a crime committed in full view for all to witness, a crime that used the rape of a white woman as “an excuse to get rid of Negroes who were acquiring wealth and property, and this kept the race terrorized” in order to “‘keep the nigger down.’” Lynching was a practice of eliminating one or two Blacks, the sacrifice for maintaining the narrative of white purity.
It is the history of this violence, this sacrifice of Black lives, of truth about white lives that should be familiar to every American as well as to the world. In light of the atrocities committed in Gaza today or in Sudan or Haiti, Americans pay, with the aid of American weaponry or American humanitarian “intervention,” for the right to proclaim themselves the world’s peacekeepers.
I’m sure a good many small-town Southern sheriffs and vigilantes thought of themselves in the same way. Good ole peacekeepers.
The racist act of lynching “was done by white man who controlled all the forces of law and order in their communities and who could have legally punished rapists and murderers, especially black men who had neither political power nor financial strength with which to evade any justly deserved fate,” writes Wells.
White Southerners, she continues, had never forgiven Blacks for their flight from the plantations in pursuit of freedom. Blacks had removed themselves from being the “playthings,” the “servants,” and the source of income for white Americans. So Blacks had to be put back in their place, had to be punished if they step out of line, if they dared to pursue freedom, let alone think about freedom beyond the noose.
Southern trees bear a
strange fruit
If, as Hemingway has suggested, the writer is any good, the writer, “may omit things he knows and the reader if the writers is writing truly enough will have a feeling of things as strongly as though the writer had stated them.”
And so when I’m reading the opening lines of Percival Everett’s Trees, 2021, I see those trees. Those strange fruit are still there. I see the carnage, day after day, year after year, generations of terrorized Black people, barely able to speak. I hear their voices…
“Money, Mississippi, looks exactly like it sounds. Named in that persistent Southern tradition of irony and with the attendant tradition of nescience, the name becomes slightly sad, a marker of self-conscious ignorance that might as well be embraced because, let’s face it, it isn’t going away.”
What’s omitted in Everett’s Trees isn’t the grisly, for every discovery of a mangled white man with barbed wire nearly severing his head from his body, there’s a horribly managed Black man, resembling Emmett Till. The white men this time are joined by others. First two, then five, then 10, then a whole community. A whole town. While two Black detectives from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigations is sent in search of the appearing and disappearing Black man.
But this is no tale of the grisly or ghostly. It’s an American tragedy. The love for what isn’t and, echoing Faulkner’s Rosa Coldfield, “never was,” is more real to many American than are their fellow human beings. So much academic discourse, so much institutional policy, so much fiction and film and video, so much of the media and its talking heads, and its clown show surrounding would-be-dictator! Enablers! And these enablers would rather welcome the continuation of the American tragedy!
We can’t ignore America’s longing for fascism.
Just like in the old days.
If you are brave and free, listen carefully and hear McIntoch. Hear his voice. Emmett Till’s crying for his mother. Over 4,000 bodies speaking at once. They won’t be silenced!