In Tennessee significant relationship between lynchings and death sentences for blacks

 As the Tennessee Department of Correction develops new lethal injection protocols and prepares to resume executions, the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC) released a deeply researched report that documents the historical role of racial discrimination and racial terror in Tennessee’s death penalty and details how that history continues to influence the administration of capital punishment.

“The government has a responsibility to treat people of all races equally. As Tennessee considers resuming executions, now is a good time to examine whether the state is meeting that responsibility when it imposes the most severe criminal punishment,” said Tiana Herring, DPIC’s Data Storyteller and the lead author of the report. Tennessee’s history informs today’s practices.

Tennessee was the site of more than 500 lynchings, according to Tennesseans for Historical Justice, and a nationwide study of death sentences between 1989 and 2017 found a significant statistical relationship between a state’s history of lynching and the number of death sentences given to Black defendants. As the report states, “State House Representative Paul Sherrell’s suggestion to allow executions by hanging people on trees earlier this year shows the continued relevance of history.”

The report documents that Tennessee prosecutors are more likely to seek the death penalty, and juries are more likely to impose it, when the victim is white. Of all death sentences imposed in the state since 1972, 74% have involved white victims. The race-ofvictim effect can also be seen in other aspects of the criminal legal system; for example, between 2013 and 2021, 29% of homicides of Black victims in the state went unsolved, compared to 11% of homicides of white victims.

The report highlights how white officials were often complicit when lynchings and other forms of white mob violence occurred. In a not uncommon example: in 1893, a 19-year-old Black man named Lee Walker who was accused of attempting to rape a white woman was lynched after the sheriff ordered his deputies to stand aside when the mob entered the jail. The jailer then gave the mob the key to his cell. As the report states, “Lynchers operated without fear in Tennessee as local authorities regularly refused to investigate lynchings. Law enforcement often concluded that deceased lynching victims had been killed by unknown parties, despite photographic and other evidence proving otherwise.” “Nothing can change the fact that racial violence and discrimination are part of Tennessee’s history. But studying the past can help us understand why racial disparities continue today, especially in our death penalty system, and inform future decisions,” said Robin Maher, DPIC’s Executive Director.

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Modern day lynchings: Videos of black men being beaten by police

Anti-Blackness as a spectacle is nothing new. White people have long intentionally and joyfully consumed Black misery. Lynchings were common in 19th and 20th century America and were explicitly public occurrences—even family entertainment, with parents and children attending and bringing food and drink, reports The Appeal. Local newspapers would detail the murders, including graphic photos of the victims. Perpetrators and onlookers often took souvenirs from the victims. Prominent white lynchers were lauded by local newspapers and posed with their children near the deceased for photos.

One of the most well-known civilian attacks on a Black person in American history began on August 20, 1955, when 14-year-old Emmett Till, a Black boy, was accused of flirting with a white woman while visiting family in Mississippi. Four days later, the woman’s husband and his brother brutally beat, shot, and dismembered Till, then threw his body into a river.

His mother, Mamie Till Mobley, rejected a mortician’s offer to “touch up” Till’s body. Instead, she chose to have an open casket funeral exposing her son’s grotesquely mangled form to illuminate the horrors of Jim Crow segregation and anti-Black racism in America. An estimated 50,000 people saw Till’s body during his funeral in Chicago. The national magazine Jet subsequently published photos of his corpse.

While Till’s death was at the hands of civilians rather than police, Till’s killers felt empowered to murder the boy because of state-sanctioned segregation and anti-Blackness. But simply publicizing images of Till’s body was not enough to spark meaningful societal change on its own—it took nearly a decade of concerted, direct political organizing to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964. To this day, despite Till’s story and photos being taught in school, memorials for Till are routinely defaced and vandalized. The gruesomeness of his murder is mirrored by the callousness with which society objectified Till’s corpse and memory.

Civilian footage started proliferating almost 40 years later. On March 3, 1991, a bystander named George Holliday filmed from his apartment balcony with a home video camera while a Black man named Rodney King was beaten by police during his arrest. Officer Lawrence Powell swung his baton, hitting King in the head and causing him to fall to the ground. Officers Powell and Timothy Wind continued to viciously beat King. Holliday sold the video to a local TV station, which then sold it to CNN. The video became international news and provided explicit, recorded evidence of anti-Black police brutality. The public wondered once again whether this footage would be enough to change law enforcement permanently. But in the decades since, the cycle has only repeated itself. Footage of police officers killing Eric Garner and George Floyd within the last decade sparked international protests but little, if any, structural changes to law enforcement.

Earlier this year, on January 7, 2023, Nichols was pulled over by Memphis police during a traffic stop. Officers dragged Nichols from his car, attempted to tase him, and then chased him on foot. When the police reached Nichols, five officers pummeled him in the head and body. The officers left Nichols on the ground for 20 minutes before emergency responders began treating him. He died three days later. Shortly before the Memphis Police Department released the footage, Police Chief Cerelyn Davis said the officers showed a “disregard of basic human rights.” But in the weeks since, the department has done next to nothing to structurally change the way it polices Memphis, aside from abolishing the small strike-force-style unit that killed Nichols. While that one team in one locality may be gone, many similar units still exist around the country.

These incidents, spanning more than 70 years, each feature the public supposedly coming face to face with the horrors of anti-Black violence. In theory, the visualization of violence against Black people should force viewers to reckon with racism, spurring awareness and change. But these examples instead make clear that no amount of visual reckoning with trauma porn can create change on its own. The nation must dispose of the idea that “activism” means simply sharing videos of police brutality online, as opposed to actual involvement in political organizing or community aid.

The consistent portrayal of anti-Black violence not only solidifies Black people as victims in the minds of white Americans, but also exposes Black Americans to repeated depictions of their own dehumanization. In 2016, clinical psychologist Monnica Williams told PBS that police brutality videos can trigger PTSD-like symptoms in Black Americans. In 2018, a Harvard University-led study found that, when police kill an unarmed Black person, it negatively impacts the mental health of nearby Black residents for months afterward. Combined with the fact that this footage has so far done little, if anything, to change American policing, trauma porn is ineffective at best and immoral at worst.

The only thing that will stop anti-Black violence is rooting out the anti-Blackness present throughout American culture. In the words of abolitionist Angela Y. Davis, “in a racist society, it is not enough to be non-racist, we must be anti-racist.” We must intentionally uplift Black experiences and address Black people’s needs. There is no need to subject ourselves to the assault or murder of Black Americans in the interim.

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One hundred years in the making America finally has an anti-lynching law

President Biden signed a bill making lynching a federal crime, for the first time explicitly criminalizing an act that had come to symbolize the grim history of racism in the United States, reported The New York Times.

“Lynching was pure terror to enforce the lie that not everyone, not everyone belongs in America, not everyone is created equal,” Mr. Biden said, speaking to civil rights leaders and others in the Rose Garden of the White House.

Moments after Mr. Biden signed the law — named for Emmett Till, the Black boy who was murdered in Mississippi in 1955 — he described the atrocity that he said was carried out against 4,400 Blacks between 1877 and 1950.

“Terror, to systematically undermine hard, hard fought civil rights. Terror, not just in the dark of the night, but in broad daylight. Innocent men, women and children hung by nooses from trees,” he said. “Bodies burned and drowned and castrated. Their crimes? Trying to vote, trying to go to school, to try and own a business or preach the gospel.”

The president’s signature ended more than 100 years of failed efforts by the federal government to specifically outlaw lynching. The bill, which makes lynching punishable by up to 30 years in prison, was passed by the House in February with only three lawmakers opposed, and passed the Senate without objection.

Legislation to criminalize lynching was first introduced in 1900, and again in subsequent years, but it was repeatedly blocked, including by Southern senators during the Jim Crow era. Lawmakers failed more than 200 times to get it passed. In 2005, the Senate formally apologized for that record.

“It failed again and again and again and again,” Vice President Kamala Harris said Tuesday, noting the history-making moment.

Ms. Harris sponsored the new law with Senator Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey, when she was still in the Senate. But she also praised Senator Tim Scott, Republican of South Carolina; and Representative Bobby L. Rush, Democrat of Illinois, who had spent years on the effort.

Both Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris gave credit to Ida B. Wells, a Black journalist who fought lynching in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and became one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. One of her descendants spoke at the event Tuesday.

“She carefully chronicled names, date, locations and excuses used to justify lynchings. She wrote articles and pamphlets and gave speeches about the atrocities,” said Michelle Duster, the great-granddaughter of Ms. Wells. “Despite losing everything, she continued to speak out across this country and Britain about the violence and terror of lynching.”

Ms. Duster recounted how Ms. Wells had visited President William S. McKinley in the White House in 1898 to urge him to make lynching a federal crime — to no avail.

“We finally stand here today, generations later, to witness this historic moment of President Biden signing the Emmett Till anti-lynching bill into law,” she said.

Mr. Biden said he hoped the law would help in the fight against hate and racism in the country. But he acknowledged that it would be an ongoing fight.

“Hate never goes away,” he said. “It only hides. It hides under the rocks. Given just a little bit of oxygen, it comes roaring back out, screaming. What stops it is all of us, not a few. All of us have to stop it.”

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U.S. Senate finally approves anti-lynching law

The Senate unanimously approved a bill that would make lynching a federal hate crime, explicitly criminalizing a heinous act that has become a symbol of the nation’s history of racial violence, reported The New York Times.

It was a remarkable moment after more than a century of failed attempts. The historic bill carries the name of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old Black boy tortured and murdered in Mississippi in 1955. Under the measure, the crime is punishable by up to 30 years in prison.

“Hallelujah — it is long overdue,” said Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, who oversaw the legislation’s passage in a sparsely filled chamber Monday evening. He added, “That it took so long is a stain, a bitter stain on America.”

Without any senators showing up to object, the bill cleared the Senate without a formal vote. The measure now heads to President Biden’s desk for his signature, having passed the House in late February with only three lawmakers opposed.

 “Although no legislation will reverse the pain and fear felt by those victims, their loved ones and Black communities, this legislation is a necessary step America must take to heal from the racialized violence that has permeated its history,” Senator Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey and a sponsor of the legislation, said in a statement Monday.

Failure to pass such a measure before this year had become a glaring example of the nation’s inadequate response to a crime that has long terrorized Black Americans. The N.A.A.C.P. estimated, based on its records, that Black victims accounted for 72 percent of 4,743 lynchings that occurred between 1882 and 1968.

“This is the year, now is the time, that we do the right thing,” said Senator Tim Scott, Republican of South Carolina and a longtime champion of the legislation, in an impassioned speech on the Senate floor on Thursday. “Not for Republicans or Democrats, but for Americans who’ve watched, with bewildered eyes and confused hearts, their government fall short on issues of importance to them again and again and again. Let this year be the year we put politics to the side and we get it done.”

Representative George Henry White of North Carolina first introduced legislation to make lynching a hate crime in 1900; he was the only Black lawmaker in Congress at the time. The bill never made it to the House floor for a vote. In the years since, more than 200 similar bills have been filed, lawmakers estimated.

In 2005, the Senate formally apologized for its failure to act on the issue, including when Southern senators blocked similar legislation during the Jim Crow era. More than a decade later, three Black senators — Mr. Scott, Mr. Booker and Kamala Harris of California — began a renewed effort to see an anti-lynching measure signed into law.

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U.S. House approves law making lynching a federal hate crime

 The U.S House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved legislation that would make lynching a federal hate crime, moving to formally outlaw a brutal act that has become a symbol of the failure by Congress and the country to reckon with the history of racial violence in America, reported the Washington Post.

Passage of the anti-lynching bill, named in honor of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old Black teenager brutally tortured and murdered in Mississippi in 1955, came after more than a century of failed attempts. Lawmakers estimated they had tried more than 200 times to pass a measure to explicitly criminalize a type of attack that has long terrorized Black Americans. This bill was approved 422 to 3, and was expected to pass the Senate, where it enjoys broad support.

“The House today has sent a resounding message that our nation is finally reckoning with one of the darkest and most horrific periods of our history, and that we are morally and legally committed to changing course,” said Representative Bobby L. Rush, Democrat of Illinois, who had vowed to see the legislation become law before retiring at the end of his term.

In a statement, Mr. Rush, who was a civil-rights leader and founded the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party, recalled when, as an 8-year-old boy, he first saw a photograph of Emmett’s battered body, an image that he said “shaped my consciousness as a Black man in America, changed the course of my life, and changed our nation.”

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What happened in Venango County, PA? Murder or self-defense

Tony Norman writes in the Pittsburgh  Post-Gazette:

Let’s take a look at another “mysterious” killing that took place in nearby Venango County in early December.

Peter Bernardo Spencer, 29, of Pittsburgh by way of Kingston, Jamaica, had accepted the invitation of a former co-worker, who happens to be white, to visit him at his cabin on Carls Road in Rockland Township, along the Allegheny River.

At some point between 1 a.m. and 2:26 a.m. on Dec. 12, Mr. Spencer was shot nine times. Four of his gun shot wounds were in his back. He was dead by the time Pa. state troopers arrived to find him face down in front of the cabin.

Four people were taken into custody, including an unidentified 25-year-old who admitted he shot Peter Spencer, but out of “self-defense.” After consultation with the Venango County DA’s office, all four were released pending an investigation.

Can anyone in Pittsburgh of any racial background imagine shooting someone nine times without spending quality time at Allegheny County Jail — maybe even until the trial? Even if only half the number of bullets were used, had it happened here bail would be stratospheric.

Now, imagine if Mr. Spencer, with his dreadlocks and Jamaican accent, had been the shooter and a 25-year-old from Mt. Lebanon had been the victim with four slugs in his back. Would there have been any chance he would still be walking around free more than a month after the event?

The Spencer family hired former Allegheny County Coroner Cyril Wecht to conduct a private autopsy because the Venango County Coroner’s Office has refused to release photos or copies of its official report or internal notes to the family or its investigators.

Dr. Wecht didn’t mince words when the Philadelphia Inquirer asked him to comment on the Venango County DA’s bizarre refusal to cooperate with the family. “My initial thought is that it’s absurd to talk about self-defense with nine gunshot wounds,” he said in what must have been the most deadpan tone he could muster.

Black Political Empowerment Project Chairman Tim Stevens, to his credit, was asking questions early on. B-PEP sent letters demanding an immediate investigation into the circumstances of Mr. Spencer’s death to U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, Pa. Gov. Tom Wolf, Pa. Attorney General Josh Shapiro and the Venango County DA’s office.

Now the case is slowly beginning to attract national interest, so it won’t be long until the Venango County DA’s office is under the same spotlight Jackie Johnson’s office in Georgia found itself under when it did nothing after Ahmaud Arbery was lynched.

The Spencer family has already called what happened to Peter Bernardo Spencer a “modern-day lynching.” Venango County is going to have to do more than hide behind procedural mumbo-jumbo to counter the charge. It needs to become transparent immediately or lose credibility.

If a Black man from the city visits a cabin in rural Pennsylvania, gets shot nine times and the shooter claims self-defense, the family of the victim is owed an explanation. Why are we hearing about Mr. Spencer’s past troubles with the law and nothing about the suspect or the others who were there that night? Drugs and weapons were found at the cabin, but six weeks later no one has been arrested.

Maybe this is simply how things are done in Venango County, but the rest of us aren’t obliged to pretend we’re still living in a time when a small town can bury its secrets. This is not a John Grisham novel.

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NYT: 'To Kill a Mockingbird' best book published in last 125 years

In October, as The New York Times marked the Book Review’s 125th anniversary, they invited readers to nominate the best book published during that time. 

The winner is To Kill a Mockingbird. Book critic Molly Young wrote in The Times:

When you revisit in adulthood a book that you last read in childhood, you will likely experience two broad categories of observation: “Oh yeah, I remember this part,” and “Whoa, I never noticed that part.” That’s what I expected when I picked up “To Kill a Mockingbird,” which was voted the best book of the past 125 years by readers in a recent New York Times poll. Two decades had passed since I’d absorbed Harper Lee’s 1960 novel. And yes, there was a huge amount I’d missed on my first time through, ranging from major themes (the prevalence of child abuse) to minor details (unfamiliar words, like “flivver”).

Inexcusable lapses in reading comprehension also surfaced, such as the fact that I hadn’t realized Mrs. Dubose — the cranky neighborhood villain — was a morphine addict. (“Mrs. Dubose is a morphine addict,” Atticus states in the book. In my defense … well, I have no defense.) As an adult, I can perceive why the novel might hold enduring appeal for many and enduring repulsion to perhaps just as many. I cannot fathom the complexities of teaching it to elementary school students in 2021, especially after reading online accounts from teachers on both the “pro” and “against” sides.

These apprehensions were present as I worked through the pages a second time, but they were overridden by the instant resurrection of exactly what I’d liked about the book the first time, which is Lee’s depiction of life in a small town. You wouldn’t think the Great Depression-era fictional Southern town of Maycomb, Ala., would have much in common with the nonfictional Northern California small town where I grew up and read “Mockingbird” in the 1990s — and yet!

Take the grim joke about a pair of Atticus’s clients, the Haverfords, who ignored their lawyer’s advice to take a plea deal and wound up hanging. No explanation is needed for their recklessness other than, as Scout puts it, that they were “Haverfords, in Maycomb County a name synonymous with jackass.” That’s on Page 5, and it’s precisely where I remember my attention perking up as a teenager. Only in a place of minimal citizenry can surnames carry such determinative weight. In my town, which had a population of approximately 1,000, the nominative shorthand took a more neutrally descriptive form: There was Barefoot Dave, who preferred to go shoeless on his rambles, and Treehouse Todd, who lived in a treehouse, and Tepee Dan — you can guess where he lived.

Much else in “Mockingbird” was recognizable from small-town living: the temptation to invent boogeymen; the excessive reliance on euphemism; the kneejerk ostracizing of those perceived as outsiders, with vandalism a common mode of reinforcement. There was the importance placed on mundane local landmarks: a certain tree, a specific fence, the house on the corner. There was the fiercely held conviction that one must mind one’s own business coupled with the exasperating practice of everyone minding everyone else’s business 100 percent of the time. (When I first moved to New York and lived in an apartment, I wondered if this last paradox would replicate itself within the diorama of my building. It did not. My urban neighbors took great pains to avoid even a molecule of anyone else’s business.)

Lee writes about the unremitting surveillance of Maycomb — of the reality that no act ultimately goes unobserved. At the age I originally read “Mockingbird,” I stole a candy bar from my town’s sole market, bragged about it to one individual and within hours was escorted by my mother back to the store and forced to apologize to the owner (and pay for the candy). There was no point in asking my mother how she knew. All knowledge was public knowledge.

I hadn’t known until reading Lee’s novel that what seemed like punishments and glories unique to my home turf were characteristic ones: the freedom to run amok, the inevitability of getting caught, the fiber-optic speed of rumor mongering, the magnification of every feud into a catastrophe.

So what struck me, rereading it, was not the totality of the book but one of its humbler accomplishments, which is how keenly Lee recreates the comforts, miseries and banalities of people gathered intimately in one little space.

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Wash Post: 'Lynchings in Mississippi never stopped'

 DeNeen L. Brown writes in the Washington Post that lynching have never stopped in Mississippi:

Since 2000, there have been at least eight suspected lynchings of Black men and teenagers in Mississippi, according to court records and police reports.

“The last recorded lynching in the United States was in 1981,” said Jill Collen Jefferson, a lawyer and founder of Julian, a civil rights organization named after the late civil rights leader Julian Bond. “But the thing is, lynchings never stopped in the United States. Lynchings in Mississippi never stopped. The evil bastards just stopped taking photographs and passing them around like baseball cards.”

Jefferson was born in Jones County, Miss., which was an epicenter of the Ku Klux Klan’s reign of terror during the civil rights movement. “Coming from Mississippi and seeing stuff intersect, talking about this stuff is like talking about what happened down the road,” said Jefferson, a Harvard Law School graduate who trained as a civil justice investigator with Bond.

In 2017, Jefferson began compiling records of Black people found hanging or mutilated across the country. In 2019, Jefferson began focusing her investigation on Mississippi. In each case she investigated, law enforcement officials ruled the deaths suicides, but the families said the victims had been lynched.

Historically, lynchings were often defined as fatal hangings by mobs, often acting with impunity and in an extrajudicial capacity to create racial terror. Crowds of White people often gathered in town squares or on courthouse lawns to watch Black people be lynched.

From 1877 to 1950, more than 4,000 Black men, women and children were lynched in cities and towns across the country, according to the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), a human rights organization based in Montgomery, Ala., which opened the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in 2018 to honor thousands of lynching victims. During that period, Mississippi recorded 581, the highest number of lynchings recorded by state.

Historians say lynchings often evoke the image of public hangings, however EJI and the NAACP expanded that definition to include any extrajudicial racial terror killing and mutilation committed to uphold racial segregation and a false premise of racial hierarchy.

The NAACP defines lynchings as “the public killing of an individual who has not received” due process under the law.

During her investigation focusing intensely on Mississippi, Jefferson began seeing patterns in the deaths and connecting the dots in recent cases of Black people found hanging.

“There is a pattern to how these cases are investigated,” Jefferson said. “When authorities arrive on the scene of a hanging, it’s treated as a suicide almost immediately. The crime scene is not preserved. The investigation is shoddy. And then there is a formal ruling of suicide, despite evidence to the contrary. And the case is never heard from again unless someone brings it up.”

Each day, Jefferson works on that list of eight suspected hangings — including the 2018 hanging Willie Andrew Jones Jr. — trying to bring justice to grieving families. The following are eight of those victims.

Raynard Johnson, 17

JUNE 16, 2000

Raynard Johnson was found hanging from a pecan tree in his front yard in Kokomo, Miss. The Mississippi Bureau of Investigation called the hanging a suicide, according to records. But his family believes Johnson was lynched, Jefferson said.

In 2000, the Rev. Jesse Jackson traveled to Mississippi to call attention to Johnson’s hanging.

“There’s enough circumstantial stuff here that warrants a serious investigation. We will not rest until those who committed this murder are brought to justice,” Jackson told demonstrators before leading a march to the pecan tree where Raynard was found. “We reject the suicide theory.”

In February 2001, the Justice Department announced it ended its investigation into Johnson’s death: “The evidence does not support a federal criminal civil rights prosecution.”

Raynard’s mother, Maria Johnson, says she is still waiting for some kind of justice. “My son’s death marked the modern age of a fight that Black people have been in in Mississippi and this nation for centuries,” Johnson said. “They tried to cover this up, but I’ve never given up hope. And that’s the thing that should scare them, because I never will.”

Nick Naylor, 23

JAN. 9, 2003

Three years later, Nick Naylor, 23, was found hanging from a tree about 11 miles from his house in Porterville, Miss. A dog chain was wrapped around his neck. Police ruled the death a suicide, but an attorney for the family said it was a lynching.

“Every time someone loses their life in a hate crime, it opens up the wound,” said Lequicha Naylor, 43, Naylor’s sister. “We have no closure. His killers are probably still around here, walking around. I have little Black boys. I’ve got grand boys — kids walking around the same place where my brother got hung. And we had tell them what happened for their own protection. One thing we always wonder is what they did to him before he died.”

Roy Veal, 55

APRIL 22, 2004

A year later, Roy Veal, was found hanging from a pecan tree near Woodville, Miss. Relatives said Veal was found with a hood over his head. A state police spokesman told reporters Veal’s death was “consistent with suicide.” Relatives said they believed Veal, who had returned to Mississippi to fight for his family’s land, was lynched. A spokesman for the sheriff’s office in Woodville said the case is with the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation.

 

LEFT: The Rev. Jesse Jackson holds the branch of a pecan tree on July 8, 2000, the site where Raynard Johnson was found hanging from a belt in Kokomo, Miss., on June 16, 2000. RIGHT: The Rev. Jesse Jackson is joined by ministers from across Mississippi for the funeral of Raynard Johnson in Sandy Hook, Miss., on June 27, 2000.

Frederick Jermaine Carter, 26

DEC. 3, 2010

Frederick Jermaine Carter was found hanging from a tree limb in a White neighborhood in Greenwood, Miss. The state medical examiner ruled Carter’s death a suicide. Relatives called it a lynching and demanded for a federal investigation.

Derrick Johnson, then-state president of the Mississippi NAACP, told reporters that the community had “lost all confidence in the ability of local law enforcement to investigate” the case of Carter’s hanging. He called on the Justice Department to investigate.

A spokesperson for the department declined to comment on the case.

The day before Carter was found dead, he had been working with his stepfather on a painting project. Relatives said he disappeared after his stepfather went to buy more paint.

“Not knowing what happened is a torment,” Brenda Carter-Evans told reporters in 2010. “I need to know what happened to my son.”

Craig Anderson, 49

JUNE 26, 2011

One of the most graphic examples of a modern-day racial terror killing occurred on June 26, 2011, when 10 white teenagers killed 49-year-old James Craig Anderson in Jackson, Miss.

The teenagers, who according to court records, decided to “go f---k with some n-----s,” ran over Anderson in a parking lot while yelling “white power.”

That night two carloads of White teenagers drove into a motel parking lot where they spotted Anderson, according to records. Some teens jumped out of the cars and started beating Anderson, in an attack captured on a surveillance video.

In March 2012, three of the teenagers — identified as Deryl Dedmon, John Rice and Dylan Butler — pleaded guilty in federal district court to charges of conspiracy and committing a hate crime.

During a sentencing hearing, U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves connected the killing of Anderson to the state’s gruesome history of lynchings, telling the courtroom that “a toxic mix of alcohol, foolishness and unadulterated hatred caused these young people to resurrect the nightmarish specter of lynchings and lynch mobs from the Mississippi we long forget.”

Reeves said the group of White teenagers targeted Black neighborhoods in Jackson, “for the sole purpose of harassing, terrorizing, physically assaulting and causing bodily injury to Black folk.”

The “marauders,” the judge said, prowled the community. “They recruited and encouraged others to join in the coordinated chaos; and they boasted about their shameful activity,” Reeves said. “This was a 2011 version of the n----- hunts.”

“Mississippi has expressed its savagery in a number of ways throughout its history, slavery being the cruelest example,” Reeves said, “but a close second being Mississippi’s infatuation with lynchings.”

Otis Byrd, 54

MARCH 19, 2015

Otis Byrd, who had been missing since March 2, 2015, was found hanging from a tree on March 19, 2015, in Port Gibson, Miss.

The Claiborne County sheriff’s office said Byrd was found with a bedsheet wrapped around his neck. Byrd had been convicted in 1980 of murder in the death of a White woman, according to the Mississippi Department of Corrections. He had been paroled in 2006.

The FBI and the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division launched an investigation. In 2015, the Justice Department released a statement regarding Byrd’s death saying that investigators had found no foul play.

“After a careful and thorough review, a team of experienced federal prosecutors and FBI agents determined that there was no evidence to prove that Byrd’s death was a homicide,” the Justice Department said.

Phillip Carroll, 22

MAY 28, 2017

Phillip Carroll was found hanging from a tree in Jackson, Miss. Police called the death a suicide. Early reports said Carroll had been found with his hands tied behind his back. Police denied that account.

“If there’s any other information or evidence that anyone may have to make us believe that it may not be a suicide, again, we’re open to any information and any evidence to aid us in the investigation,” Jackson Police Commander Tyree Jones told reporters. “But as of right now, we don’t have anything other than the fact that his death has been ruled a suicide.”

Deondrey Montreal Hopkins, 35

MAY 5, 2019

Deondrey Montreal Hopkins, who lived in Columbus, Miss., was found hanging from a tree on a bank of the Luxapallila Creek. Columbus Police Chief Fred Shelton said Hopkins’s death was not a homicide.

The Justice Department declined to comment on the case.

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MCN/USA TODAY NETWORK: Virginia begins down the road of racial reconciliation

Matthew T. Mangino
More Content Now/USA Today Network

February 12, 2021

Last week, the Virginia House of Delegates voted to abolish the death penalty. In the modern era of the death penalty Virginia is second only to Texas in the number of condemned prisoners sent to their death. Gov. Ralph Northam has promised to sign the bill, which will make Virginia the 23rd state in the country without a death penalty.

            Virginia’s use of the death penalty dates back over 400 years—to 1608, when Jamestown settlers carried out the first recorded execution in North America. According to TIME, in the centuries since, amid periods of slavery, Reconstruction and Jim Crow segregation, Virginia has executed hundreds of people.

Virginia has also been the setting for at least 87 documented lynchings between 1888 and 1932, including Shedrick Thompson, a black man who was lynched in Linden, Virginia in 1932. According to research by James Madison University, even though a small number of the victims of mob violence were white, lynching was essentially a form of state-sanctioned terrorism against African Americans—few of those involved in lynchings were ever indicted and even less faced trial.

Virginia is also the state that sentenced Daryl Atkins to death twice and where seeking the death penalty for a third time. The irony is that Atkins’ first death penalty was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court when the court declared that executing the intellectually disabled violated the Eighth Amendment ban against cruel and unusual punishment. The landmark decision carries his name Atkins v. Virginia.

Atkins’ case was remanded to Virginia for resentencing and the trial court sentenced him a second time to death.  The case was sent back for a third sentencing when Atkins was removed from death row for an unrelated matter.

Gov. Northam was involved in a racist scandal himself. A decades-old photo of a person in blackface and another in a Ku Klux Klan robe surfaced from Northam’s medical school yearbook page.

Virginia is the home of Washington, Jefferson, Madison and Monroe—literally the founding fathers of the United States of America.  They were also slave owners. Virginia has a lot to reconcile.

Northam’s scandal nearly forced him from office. He resisted widespread calls to resign and pledged the remainder of his term to rebuilding trust and addressing Virginia’s long history of racism and inequity.

To that end Northam empaneled The Commission to Examine Racial Inequity in Virginia Law in 2019 with an examination of racist laws that—though long unenforced—had remained on the books.

The commission is comprised of lawyers, judges and law professors chaired by a former state chief deputy attorney general. The 100-plus page report focuses on six policy areas: housing, education, criminal justice, health, environmental justice and agricultural equity.

In the realm of criminal justice, abolition of the death penalty is a start. Blacks have been disproportionately represented in terms of executions in Virginia.  As for education, the commission proposed overhauling the school funding formula, repealing statutory language that limits the power granted to the state to draw school zone lines, and encouraging programs like choice zoning and magnet schools to improve integration, reported The Associated Press.

With regard to housing, the commission recommended increasing affordable housing and reducing evictions through changes to landlord-tenant laws.

The report also calls for collecting better data on racial disparities in the criminal justice system; loosening or repealing restrictions on voting rights for people convicted of felonies; and closing the gap in healthcare access.

The report provides recommendations, not mandates, but it is a start for a state that a little more than three years ago was maligned for a rally of white nationalists and neo-Nazis in Charlottesville that turned violent and deadly.

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Tulsa, OK looks for bodies from huge 1921 racist massacre

Archaeologists plan to excavate part of a cemetery in Tulsa, Okla., to see if it holds the remains of black residents slaughtered by white mobs during a massacre in 1921—according to The New York Times, one of the worst instances of racist violence in U.S. history.

The mayor said it was an “unprecedented” step to address one of the worst instances of racist violence in American history, an episode that for decades was rarely acknowledged in public by city leaders.

The archaeologists plan to dig up a small section of the Oaklawn Cemetery, east of downtown, where they found evidence last year of a possible mass grave site. The excavation, announced at a committee meeting on Monday, “would establish the presence or absence of human remains, determine the nature of the interments, and obtain data to help inform the future steps in the investigation, including appropriate recovery efforts,” the city said in a statement.

“We are proposing this intermediate step to obtain just a sample and additional information — essentially a proof of concept, if you will — to demonstrate: ‘Do we, in fact, have human remains here? And do they seem to be consistent with race massacre victims?’” Dr. Kary Stackelbeck, the state archaeologist of Oklahoma, said at the meeting.

Previous investigations have identified possible locations for the mass graves and compiled historical evidence of the massacre, which for decades was rarely mentioned in textbooks or publicly acknowledged by white city officials. The excavation, which is slated for April, raises the tantalizing possibility that, after nearly a century of shame and inattention, the bodies of at least some of the victims could finally be found.

 “This step is unprecedented,” Mayor G.T. Bynum said in an interview on Wednesday. “This is the part of the search where we’re moving beyond what anyone’s ever done before.”

The effort still needs to clear some procedural hurdles, including the notification of family members of people whose graves are near the site, Dr. Stackelbeck said in an interview. But Mr. Bynum said he was confident the excavation would go forward.

Jim Goodwin, a lawyer in Tulsa and publisher of The Oklahoma Eagle, said residents had been asking city leaders to find the bodies of the victims for years. Mr. Goodwin’s grandfather was a business manager at a newspaper that was burned down in the massacre.

“The fact that our mayor is doing it when requests have been made of other mayors, the fact that he’s taking it seriously and making an effort to do something about it, to his credit, is something I think is very important rather than ignoring and trying to bury the memory,” Mr. Goodwin said.

The rampage started on May 31, 1921, after an accusation that a black man had sexually assaulted a white woman. Charges were later dropped, and it was most likely that the man had tripped and accidentally stepped on the woman’s foot, according to a 2001 report from the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921.

Crowds gathered outside the courthouse where he was held. Some black residents, concerned for the man’s safety, armed themselves to patrol the streets. A mob of white men then attacked and set fire to the predominantly black Greenwood neighborhood, including the prosperous business district known as Black Wall Street.

As many as 300 people were killed, and a whole section of the city destroyed, including more than 1,200 homes. Witnesses said they saw bodies being dumped in some parts of the city.

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Columbus Day--the celebration of Italian heritage--grew out of the lynching of 11 Italians in 1890 New Orleans

On this Columbus Day, Brent Staples writes in the New York Times about the lynching of 11 Italians in New Orleans.  Staples does not hold back on his employer (The Times) and its deplorable, racist, violence condoning writing of the late 19th and early 20th.

The carnage in New Orleans was set in motion in the fall of 1890, when the city’s popular police chief, David Hennessy, was assassinated on his way home one evening. Hennessy had no shortage of enemies. The historian John V. Baiamonte Jr. writes that he had once been tried for murder in connection with the killing of a professional rival. He is also said to have been involved in a feud between two Italian businessmen. On the strength of a clearly suspect witness who claimed to hear Mr. Hennessy say that “dagoes” had shot him, the city charged 19 Italians with complicity in the chief’s murder. 

That the evidence was distressingly weak was evident from the verdicts that were swiftly handed down: Of the first nine to be tried, six were acquitted; three others were granted mistrials. The leaders of the mob that then went after them advertised their plans in advance, knowing full well that the city’s elites — who coveted the businesses the Italians had built or hated the Italians for fraternizing with African-Americans — would never seek justice for the dead. After the lynching, a grand jury investigation pronounced the killings praiseworthy, turning that inquiry into what the historian Barbara Botein describes as “possibly one of the greatest whitewashes in American history.”

The blood of the New Orleans victims was scarcely dry when The Times published a cheerleading news story — “Chief Hennessy Avenged: Eleven of his Italian Assassins Lynched by a Mob” — that reveled in the bloody details. It reported that the mob had consisted “mostly of the best element” of New Orleans society. The following day, a scabrous Times editorial justified the lynching — and dehumanized the dead, with by-now-familiar racist stereotypes.

“These sneaking and cowardly Sicilians,” the editors wrote, “the descendants of bandits and assassins, who have transported to this country the lawless passions, the cutthroat practices … are to us a pest without mitigations. Our own rattlesnakes are as good citizens as they. Our own murderers are men of feeling and nobility compared to them.” The editors concluded of the lynching that it would be difficult to find “one individual who would confess that privately he deplores it very much.”

Few who march in Columbus Day parades or recount the tale of Columbus’s voyage from Europe to the New World are aware of how the holiday came about or that President Benjamin Harrison proclaimed it as a one-time national celebration in 1892 — in the wake of a bloody New Orleans lynching that took the lives of 11 Italian immigrants. 

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Stevenson: Slavery gave America a fear of black people

An essay by Bryan Stevenson for the 1619 Project, New York Times Magazine:
The United States has the highest rate of incarceration of any nation on Earth: We represent 4 percent of the planet’s population but 22 percent of its imprisoned. In the early 1970s, our prisons held fewer than 300,000 people; since then, that number has grown to more than 2.2 million, with 4.5 million more on probation or parole. Because of mandatory sentencing and “three strikes” laws, I’ve found myself representing clients sentenced to life without parole for stealing a bicycle or for simple possession of marijuana. And central to understanding this practice of mass incarceration and excessive punishment is the legacy of slavery.

It took only a few decades after the arrival of enslaved Africans in Virginia before white settlers demanded a new world defined by racial caste. The 1664 General Assembly of Maryland decreed that all Negroes within the province “shall serve durante vita,” hard labor for life. This enslavement would be sustained by the threat of brutal punishment. By 1729, Maryland law authorized punishments of enslaved people including “to have the right hand cut off ... the head severed from the body, the body divided into four quarters, and head and quarters set up in the most public places of the county.”

Soon American slavery matured into a perverse regime that denied the humanity of black people while still criminalizing their actions. As the Supreme Court of Alabama explained in 1861, enslaved black people were “capable of committing crimes,” and in that capacity were “regarded as persons” — but in most every other sense they were “incapable of performing civil acts” and considered “things, not persons.”

The 13th Amendment is credited with ending slavery, but it stopped short of that: It made an exception for those convicted of crimes. After emancipation, black people, once seen as less than fully human “slaves,” were seen as less than fully human “criminals.” The provisional governor of South Carolina declared in 1865 that they had to be “restrained from theft, idleness, vagrancy and crime.” Laws governing slavery were replaced with Black Codes governing free black people — making the criminal-justice system central to new strategies of racial control.

These strategies intensified whenever black people asserted their independence or achieved any measure of success. During Reconstruction, the emergence of black elected officials and entrepreneurs was countered by convict leasing, a scheme in which white policymakers invented offenses used to target black people: vagrancy, loitering, being a group of black people out after dark, seeking employment without a note from a former enslaver. The imprisoned were then “leased” to businesses and farms, where they labored under brutal conditions. An 1887 report in Mississippi found that six months after 204 prisoners were leased to a white man named McDonald, dozens were dead or dying, the prison hospital filled with men whose bodies bore “marks of the most inhuman and brutal treatment ... so poor and emaciated that their bones almost come through the skin.”

Anything that challenged the racial hierarchy could be seen as a crime, punished either by the law or by the lynchings that stretched from Mississippi to Minnesota. In 1916, Anthony Crawford was lynched in South Carolina for being successful enough to refuse a low price for his cotton. In 1933, Elizabeth Lawrence was lynched near Birmingham for daring to chastise white children who were throwing rocks at her.

It’s not just that this history fostered a view of black people as presumptively criminal. It also cultivated a tolerance for employing any level of brutality in response. In 1904, in Mississippi, a black man was accused of shooting a white landowner who had attacked him. A white mob captured him and the woman with him, cut off their ears and fingers, drilled corkscrews into their flesh and then burned them alive — while hundreds of white spectators enjoyed deviled eggs and lemonade. The landowner’s brother, Woods Eastland, presided over the violence; he was later elected district attorney of Scott County, Miss., a position that allowed his son James Eastland, an avowed white supremacist, to serve six terms as a United States senator, becoming president pro tempore from 1972 to 1978.
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Texas man executed for 1998 'lynching' of James Byrd, Jr.

The 4th Execution of 2019

John William King, 44, convicted two decades ago for killing James Byrd Jr. in an act of unfathomable racist brutality in the small town of Jasper, was executed on April 24, 2019 by the State of Texas on with a dose of pentobarbital, reported the New York Times.

The execution, carried out at the state’s death chamber in Huntsville, came after the United States Supreme Court turned down Mr. King’s last petition for a stay. He was pronounced dead at 7:08 p.m., said Jeremy Desel, a spokesman for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.

Mr. King kept his eyes closed as witnesses arrived to the execution chamber on Wednesday, The Associated Press reported. When the prison warden, Bill Lewis, asked him if he had any final words, Mr. King said, “No.”

Mr. King made a final statement issued in writing, Mr. Desel said. “Capital Punishment: Them without the capital get the punishment,” it said.

Early on a Sunday morning in 1998, Mr. King and two other white men attacked Mr. Byrd, a 49-year-old black man who had been offered a ride home in a sinister gesture of neighborliness. The men beat him, spray-painted his face, chained him to the back of a pickup truck and dragged him to his death on an isolated back road. The motive seemed shockingly clear-cut: Mr. King, who had come out of a stint in prison, was a committed white supremacist, his body a billboard of racist tattoos, including one depicting a black man hanged in a noose.

Louvon Harris, a sister of Mr. Byrd’s who planned to attend the execution, said on Tuesday that Mr. King’s death by lethal injection would not compare to the way he had tortured her brother. “He’s not going through any pain,” she said. “He’s not chained and bound and dragged on a concrete road, swinging back and forth like a sack of potatoes, with an arm coming off and being decapitated or nothing like that.”

“When you look at it at that angle,” she continued, “I don’t have sympathy.”

Less than a year after the killing, Mr. King became the first white man in modern Texas history to be sentenced to death for killing a black person. This was a troubling milestone given that, according to the Equal Justice Initiative, 344 black people were lynched in the 73 years after Reconstruction, a tally that included only documented lynchings and that stopped in 1950.

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New Orleans to apologize for lynching of 11 Italians in 1891, one of the largest mass lynchings in American history

The Washington Post reports today about the lynching of 11 Italian immigrants in New Orleans in 1891, in what some say was the largest mass lynching in American history.

Thousands of people, among them the most prominent businessmen, lawyers, merchants and politicians in New Orleans, marched in circles around a statue of Henry Clay. The crowd was “yelling itself hoarse,” bent on a kind of justice that would be called murder today but that The Washington Post and numerous other newspapers called “vengeance” in 1891.

The mob’s victims awaited in the Orleans Parish jail, all of them Italian immigrants or children of immigrants who had just been acquitted in the shooting death of the New Orleans police chief; others still awaited trial. To this day, the chief’s killer or killers have never been identified. But on the morning of March 14, 1891, despite the not-guilty verdicts, the mob seemed certain.

“When the law is powerless,” William Parkerson, the mob’s leader and mayor’s former campaign manager, yelled to the crowd, according to a 1991 New Orleans Times-Picayune article, “rights delegated by the people are relegated back to the people, and they are justified in doing that which the courts have failed to do.”

Once the speeches finished, The Post reported then, everyone stood still for a moment, quiet just long enough for one man’s voice to catch the agitated crowd’s attention: “Shall we get our guns?”

The verdict was decisive. That morning, anywhere from 8,000 to 20,000 vigilantes armed with Winchester rifles, axes and shotguns broke down the door of the parish jail and trampled past the passive sheriff’s deputies until they captured 11 defenseless Italians and riddled their bodies with bullets. Two were dragged outside and hanged, one by a tree limb and the other by a lamp post.

Historians have called the massacre the largest mass lynching in American history. The vigilante mob escaped any consequence, and the city of New Orleans refused to take responsibility.

But now, 128 years later, the city is trying to make amends On April 12, New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell (D) is expected to apologize to the Italian American community for the infamous killings — a concession that Michael Santo, special counsel to the Order Sons and Daughters of Italy, said will shore up “long-lasting wounds” among Italians. The mayor is expected to issue a formal proclamation, according to the group. A spokesman for Cantrell confirmed the pending apology to the Associated Press on Sunday.

“This is not something that’s too little, too late,” Santo told The Post. “This is something that has to be addressed.”

The lynchings were a product of anti-Italian sentiment and public hysteria over a shadowy “Mafia” in the aftermath of the chief’s slaying, according to a 1992 paper in the Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association by John V. Baiamonte Jr.

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GateHouse: U.S. Senate finally votes to outlaw lynching

Matthew T. Mangino

GateHouse Media

December 21, 2018

This week Congress passed a criminal justice reform bill. The bill has been touted as the most significant change to the federal criminal justice system in decades. The bill, known as the First Step Act, sits on President Donald Trump’s desk awaiting his signature.

Lost in all the hoopla was a little noted piece of legislation that unanimously passed in the Senate this week - making lynching a federal civil rights crime.

The bill was sponsored by Senator Kamala Harris of California. “This is a meaningful moment for this body,” said New Jersey Senator Corey Booker.

The first anti-lynching bill was introduced in Congress 100 years ago. The bill passed the House but was opposed by southern senators and failed repeatedly. According to the Washington Times, the Senate failed to pass an anti-lynching bill nearly 200 times before this week.

Ironically, the presiding officer for the bill’s floor debate was Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi who was maligned last month for making a joke about a public hanging during her reelection campaign. “If he invited me to a public hanging, I’d be on the front row,” Hyde-Smith was heard saying during a campaign event. Hyde-Smith did not immediately apologize for her remarks. That may have been a tactical campaign decision in a state that had the highest number of lynchings in the country from 1882 to 1968.

Lynchings were a tool used to oppress freed slaves after the Civil War. They were often committed by mobs who murdered victims with impunity, often joined by law enforcement, sometimes on the steps of the courthouse.

Lynch mobs, particularly in response to alleged black-on-white crime, were rampant in the south during the late 19th and early-20th centuries. Black men were drug from their homes or jail cells and hung by the neck from the nearest tree or lamppost.

The last lynching in this country occurred in Mobile, Alabama, in 1981. Members of the Ku Klux Klan beat and killed Michael Donald, a young African-American man, and hung his body from a tree. Donald was randomly targeted after the trial of a black man accused of killing a white man in Mobile ended in a mistrial.

One of Donald’s killers, Henry Hayes, was sentenced to death and executed in 1997. The execution of Hayes was the first in Alabama since 1913 for a white-on-black crime. It would be the only execution of a Klan member during the 20th century for the murder of an African-American man.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the state that conducted the last public execution in 1936 attended by an estimate 20,000 people, said when asked about the anti-lynching legislation, “I thought we did that years ago.”

A lynching is an extrajudicial act - an execution carried out by mob rule. The color of an accused and victim’s skin also plays a role in state-sanctioned executions. The death penalty in America has some racial inequities.

People of color have accounted for a disproportionate 43 percent of total executions since 1976 and 55 percent of those currently sitting on death row, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, a non-profit advocacy group. While white victims accounted for approximately one-half of all murder victims, 80 percent of all capital cases involve white victims.

In 2005, the U.S. Senate approved a resolution apologizing for its failure to enact federal anti-lynching legislation. Now 13 years after its apology and nearly 40 years after the last known lynching, Congress has begun to take formal action to end this shameful inaction.

As capital punishment continues to decline in this country will it take the Congress or U.S. Supreme Court another 40 years to acknowledge the arbitrary nature and fallibility of the death penalty?

Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book The Executioner’s Toll, 2010 was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter @MatthewTMangino.

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Lynchings in the American west

Scholars of lynching debate its definition, some even concluding that it is impossible to define, reported the High Country News. One commonly used, but still contested, definition from 1940 listed several necessary conditions: “There must be legal evidence that a person has been killed, and that he met his death illegally at the hands of a group acting under the pretext of service to justice, race, or tradition.” Because definitions are difficult and evidence elusive, the precise number of lynching victims remains unknown. But the death toll hovers somewhere around 5,000.

For many Westerners, the word “lynching” brings to mind the vigilantes and what came to be known as “frontier justice.” The terms play on the long-held mythologies of a violent frontier where the need for justice sometimes preceded an established legal system. In this telling, men banded together to fulfill community obligations, punishing those who transgressed the laws of property (e.g., they stole livestock) or person (e.g., they raped women). White men formed posses and delivered swift justice to the guilty. This storyline goes back to some of the earliest Western historians, such as Hubert Howe Bancroft, who found much to admire in these actions. In his two-volume “Popular Tribunals,” in 1887, Bancroft characterized the San Francisco Vigilance Committees as “virtuous, intelligent, and responsible citizens with coolness and deliberation arresting momentarily the operations of law for the salvation of society.” Lynchings were regarded as exercises of sovereignty, the will of the people — as American as the frontier from which the nation supposedly sprang. Not surprisingly, the reality was more complicated.

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GateHouse: National Memorial for Peace and Justice promotes reconciliation and healing

Matthew T. Mangino

GateHouse Media

April 27, 2018

In 2008, veteran newscaster Ted Koppel told NPR’s Tell Me More host Michel Martin that “lynchings are a form of terrorism.” Terror that was rooted in a region of the United States fearful of equality for black men and women.

Lynchings were a tool used to oppress freed slaves after the Civil War. They were often committed by mobs who murdered victims with impunity, often joined by law enforcement, sometimes on the very steps of the courthouse.

In 2015, the Equal Justice Initiative released a report “Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Terror” which documented more than 4,400 lynchings of black people — 800 more than had been previously reported.

Every society has had forms of extrajudicial punishments. The legal and cultural basis for American lynchings were imported from Europe and firmly implanted in colonial America. The origin of the term lynching has been attributed to a Virginian named Charles Lynch. He oversaw an extrajudicial court in a colonial Virginia county that incarcerated Loyalist supporters of the British during the Revolutionary War. Lynch’s name was adopted more for the extrajudicial — not an official sanctioned court — nature of his conduct, not racial underpinnings.

In an effort to begin the healing and raise awareness of the legacy of Southern injustice and brutality the National Memorial for Peace and Justice opened this week overlooking the Alabama State Capitol in Montgomery. The museum is dedicated to the victims of American white supremacy.

According to the New York Times, the museum does not rely on conventional historic artifacts and detached commentary. “It is perhaps better described as the presentation of an argument, supported by firsthand accounts and contemporary documents, that the slavery system did not end but evolved: From the family-shattering domestic slave trade to the decades of lynching terror, to the suffocating segregation of Jim Crow to the age of mass incarceration in which we now live.”

It is altogether fitting that the Memorial sits high above the state capitol in Montgomery, which still flies the national flag of the Confederate States of America.

The last lynching in this country occurred in Mobile, Alabama, in 1981. Members of the Ku Klux Klan beat and killed Michael Donald, a young African-American man, and hung his body from a tree. Donald was randomly targeted after a trial in Mobile of a black man accused of killing a white man ended in a mistrial.

One of Donald’s killers, Henry Hays, was sentenced to death and executed in 1997. The execution of Hays was the first in Alabama since 1913 for a white-on-black crime. It was the only execution of a Klan member during the 20th century for the murder of an African-American.

The country is struggling to come to terms with its history of slavery, Jim Crow laws, lynchings and segregation. As states and municipalities across the south debate the removal of Confederate monuments, the memorial shines a light on the legacy of racism in the American South.

The memorial is a stark reminder of the horrendous acts that men and women are capable of inflicting on one another. The memorial has a walkway with 800 weathered steel columns, all hanging from a roof. According to the Washington Post, etched on each column is the name of a county and the people who were lynched there, most listed by name, many simply as “unknown.”

Bryan Stevenson, the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, the nonprofit organization behind the memorial, said inspiration for the memorial came from the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, Germany and the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Thinking of America in terms of the Holocaust and Apartheid may be difficult, but racial oppression is an issue the country must face. The National Memorial for Peace and Justice may be the place to continue the process of reconciliation and healing.

Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book The Executioner’s Toll, 2010 was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter @MatthewTMangino.

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GateHouse: Street law - a resurgence of vigilante justice

Matthew T. Mangino
GateHouse News Service
April 11, 2014
Last week, a man was savagely beaten by an angry mob after he accidentally hit a kid with his pickup on a Detroit street. Steve Utash stopped to help David Harris, a 10-year-old boy he struck while on his way home from work. That’s when a group of about a dozen men, who had gathered after the accident, began to beat him, reported the Detroit News.
The mob attack is an example of “vigilante justice”—the actions of a group of people who claim to enforce the law but lack the legal authority to do so. A vigilante can also be a single person who seeks to take the law into his own hands. The term can also describe a general state of disarray or lawlessness.
One of the best known vigilantes is Bernhard Goetz. In 1984, Goetz was on a New York City subway when two teenagers approached him. One of the teens demanded money. Goetz pulled a gun and fired five shots. Four young men were wounded—one suffering a severed spinal cord. New York City newspapers dubbed the gunman "the subway vigilante."
At the time, New York City’s violent crime rate was unprecedented, and in some circles Goetz was praised as a hero.
During some of the darkest times in American history, lynching was viewed as vigilantism. In reality, lynchings were evidence of a general state of lawlessness. In the South, an estimated two or three blacks were lynched each week in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In Mississippi alone, 500 blacks were lynched from the mid-1800s to 1955. Nationwide, the figure climbed to nearly 5,000, according to the Public Broadcasting System.
Today lynching is not only outlawed but also a sign of collective incivility. Lynching is often defined as "any act of violence inflicted by a mob upon the body of another person which results in the death of the person.” For instance, South Carolina law defines a “mob” as "the assemblage of two or more persons, without color or authority of law, for the premeditated purpose and with the premeditated intent of committing an act of violence upon the person of another."
At times the color of law is often blurred. In 1933, a prominent California business owner’s son was kidnapped for ransom. The kidnapping turned to murder and two men were arrested.
After the victim’s body was discovered, the media announced that the two “killers” would be lynched at San Jose’s St. James Park. Some 15,000 people gathered in the park. Gov. James Rolph refused to take any action to protect the men. He even announced that anyone who participated in the lynching would receive a pardon.
In 2010, John D. Murphy wrote about the lynching in the San Jose Mercury, “Never before or since has the rule of law been so collectively subverted by law enforcement (including the FBI), public officials, community leaders, everyday citizens and the press.”
Lynchings in the South were often covered in the local newspaper. The website for PBS’s American Experience provided examples of newspaper headlines from about the same time as the California lynching. “Negro and White Scuffle; Negro Is Jailed, Lynched" was published in the Atlanta Constitution on July 6, 1933. "Negro Is Slain By Texas Posse: Victim's Heart Removed After His Capture By Armed Men" was published in The New York World Telegram on Dec. 8, 1933.
Vigilante justice is nothing new in Detroit. In 2013, a mob located a man accused of raping a 15-year-old girl with Down syndrome. They beat him repeatedly. Witnesses at one point saw five attackers. At least one was armed with a baseball bat.
In 2011, the city had 32 self-defense killings, a 79 percent increase from the previous year, according to the Daily Mail.
Detroit’s lawlessness is on the mind of the young and old alike. “We got to have a little Old West up here in Detroit. That’s what it’s gonna take,” 73-year-old Julia Brown told the Daily Mail. “I don’t intend to be one of their victims, I’m planning on taking one out.”
Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book “The Executioner’s Toll, 2010” is due out this summer. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter at @MatthewTMangino.
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