THE ROOTS & LEGACY OF U.S. LYNCHINGS
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From: Malaika Kambon
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Subject: [unioNews] THE ROOTS & LEGACY OF U.S. LYNCHINGS
NEW AFRIKAN MILLENNIUM
29 JANUARY 2004
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Date: Thu, 29 Jan 2004 13:44:24 -0500
-------------------------
Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Feb. 5, 2004
issue of Workers World newspaper
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BLACK HISTORY MONTH: THE ROOTS AND LEGACY OF U.S. LYNCHINGS
["It is well known that the black race is the most oppressed
and most exploited of the human family ... that the spread of
capitalism and the discovery of the New World had as an
immediate result the rebirth of slavery which was, for
centuries, a scourge for the Negroes and a bitter disgrace
for mankind. What everyone does not perhaps know is that
after 65 years of so-called emancipation, American Negroes
still endure atrocious moral and material sufferings, of
which the most cruel and horrible is the custom of lynching."
Excerpted from Ho Chi Minh's International Correspondence,
No. 59, written in 1924]
Ho Chi Minh, the anti-imperialist communist leader of the
Vietnam ese people, made this statement at the height of
lynchings in the United States, mainly in the South. He spent
a number of years living in the United States, which helped
elevate his understanding of racist and class injustice,
before returning to his beloved homeland. His observations
were very illuminating, considering how cruelly the
Vietnamese and other Indochinese peoples were treated by
French colonialism and U.S. militarism before their decades-
long liberation struggle triumphed.
Has there been any real qualitative social change for African
Americans in the United States since Ho Chi Minh's words were
published 80 years ago? Has the legacy of horrific lynchings
been tossed into the dustbin of history or is it still alive
and well today?
With the rise of class society thousands of years ago,
vigilante-sponsored violence along with state-orchestrated
violence became commonplace. In the United States, people of
color, labor organizers, Jewish immigrants, political
radicals and others have certainly felt the wrath of
lynchings by those who profess a white-supremacist mentality.
Today for African Americans, lynchings remain a grim, painful
reminder of almost three centuries of being treated as second-
and third-class citizens.
LYNCHINGS AND SLAVERY
Some historians trace "lynch law" to Col. Charles Lynch, who,
during the war of independence by the 13 colonies, was based
in Virginia to deal with British colonialists. Slavery was
nothing more than institutionalized lynching, since African
peoples were treated as less than human or as property.
Historian John F. Callahan writes: "During slavery there were
numerous public punishments of slaves, none of which were
preceded by trials or any other semblance of civil or
judicial processes. Justice depended solely upon the
slaveholder. Executions, whippings, brandings, and other
forms of severe punishment, including sometimes the public
separation of families, were meted out by authority or at the
command of the master or his representative. Often, slaves
from the plantation and, sometimes, nearby plantations were
assembled and made to witness the punishment as an example of
the master's absolute authority to wield the power of life
and death over each and every slave." ("The Oxford Companion
to African American Literature," 1997)
After the Civil War, freed slaves fought for complete
liberation during the Reconstruction period. But lynchings
increased dramatically when former Confederate officers and
vengeful South ern planters regrouped to form the Ku Klux
Klan, White Citizens Councils and other extra-legal groups to
literally terrorize Black people back into semi-slavery
conditions.
With the Compromise of 1877, the federal government pulled
out its troops and left the freed slaves at the mercy of
these white-supremacist terrorists. As representatives of the
interests of the ascendant Northern capitalist class, the
government wanted to put a brake on fulfilling the same
political and economic rights for Black workers in the South
as those generally granted to Northern white male workers,
thus keeping wages down by dividing workers along racial
lines.
"Between 1882 (when reliable statistics were first collected)
and 1968 (when the classic forms of lynching had
disappeared), 4,743 persons died of lynching, 3,446 of them
black men and women. Mississippi (539 black victims, 42
white) led this grim parade of death, followed by Georgia
(492, 39), Texas (352, 141), Louisiana (335, 56), and Alabama
(299, 48). From 1882 to 1901, the annual number nationally
usually exceeded 100; 1892 had a record 230 deaths (161
black, 69 white). Although lynchings declined somewhat in the
20th century, there were still 97 in 1908 (89 black, 8
white), 83 in the racially troubled postwar year of 1919 (76,
7, plus some 25 race riots), 30 in 1926 (23, 7), and 28 in
1933 (24, 4)." (Robert L. Zangrando, "The Reader's Companion
to American History," 1991)
As stated above, these statistics do not take into full
account the victims in the "race riots" that began in the
late 1800s. These massacres of Black people increas ed at the
end of World War I when Black soldiers, who had been
relegated to segregated units overseas, returned home
expecting to be treated as full citizens.
There was also the infamous Tulsa "race riot" in 1921, when
white business owners instigated a massacre upon the
prosperous Black community.
No white person was ever convicted of killing a Black person
during these tragic episodes. This racist atmosphere was
aided by the "separate but equal" law passed by the U.S.
Supreme Court in 1896 that legalized racist Jim Crow laws in
the South and other sections of the United States.
RACIST USE OF THE RAPE CHARGE
A recurring "excuse" for the lynchings of Black men has been
the alleged rape of white women. Under slavery, while both
African women and men were "owned" body and soul, the
systematic rape of Black women was viewed as the "property
right" of the white slavemaster. The recent revelation that
the late arch-racist Strom Thurmond "fathered" a daughter
during the 1920s with a Black servant reflects the
persistence of semi-slavery conditions.
Sexual relations between Black men and white women were
socially viewed as taboo from the days of slavery until 1967,
when miscegenation laws were struck down by the Supreme
Court. This important con cession won in the civil-rights
struggle legalized the right of Black-white heterosexual
couples to marry in the South.
Just the rumor that a Black man had raped a white woman would
signal that a racist lynching would not be far behind.
Fourteen-year-old Emmett Till was tortured to death by
racists in 1955 for supposedly whistling at a white woman in
Mississippi.
The judicial system began instituting legal lynchings.
Hundreds of Black men were executed after being charged with
raping white women. Who could ever forget the Scottsboro case
in the early 1930s, where nine young Black men were accused
of gang raping two white women in Alabama? The case gained
worldwide attention as the Communist Party and other
progressives came to the defense of these innocent Black
youths.
Even though the women finally admitted under oath that no
rape had occurred, most of the youths were forced to spend
many years in prison until public pressure forced the U.S.
government to pardon them.
There are currently two important cases that could be
considered modern-day Scottsboro cases. The case of Darryl
Hunt was publicized in a Jan. 5 column by Bob Herbert, an
African American opinion writer for the New York Times.
Herbert described how in 1984, Hunt, then 19 years old, was
accused of the rape and murder of Deborah Sykes, a 25-year-
old white woman in North Carolina. Forensic DNA testing had
just been developed. During the original trial it proved that
Hunt was innocent of the charge--but still he languished in
jail for almost 20 years.
Hunt's lawyers forced a public outcry, and finally exposé
articles in the Winston-Salem Journal forced the courts to
release Hunt this past December on a $250,000 bond pending a
hearing in February. His lawyers are hoping that all murder
charges will eventually be dropped by the prosecution. Only
time will tell.
The second case has received more national attention. Marcus
Dixon, 18, an academically gifted athlete, received a 10-year
prison sentence in Rome, Ga., after being found guilty of
statutory rape, a misdemeanor, and aggravated child
molestation, a felony. The judge sentenced him to 10 years in
prison on the felony charge.
Dixon testified that he had had consensual sex with a
classmate who was three months shy of her 16th birthday at
the time. He stated that she told him her father was a racist
and that she feared he would kill the two if he caught them
together. (New York Times, Jan. 22)
A jury found Dixon innocent of rape, sexual battery and
aggravated assault, all felonies. Five of the jurors publicly
stated that they would not have convicted Dixon on the other
charges had they known about the prospect of a long prison
sentence.
Civil-rights forces along with defense attorneys have mounted
a nationwide campaign of legal and political pressure on the
Georgia Supreme Court to overturn this outrageous conviction
and sentence.
'FIGHTING FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE'
Earl Ofari Hutchinson has assembled figures to show that the
U.S. criminal justice system is still racist to the
core: "According to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund ... between
1930 and 1996, more than half of all those executed have been
African-Americans. When the crime (or accusation) is rape,
the death penalty has almost always been exclusively reserved
for blacks. Of the 453 men executed for rape since 1930, 405
have been black. Nearly all of them were executed in the
South. They were arrested and convicted on the flimsiest
evidence, usually no more than the word of a white woman. At
the same time, not one white man received the death penalty
for raping a black woman. There is no official record in any
Southern state of a black man ever being executed for raping
a black woman. The victims of all but 44 of the blacks
executed in the South from 1930 through 1984 were white. Not
much has changed over the years. A black is still 11 times
more likely to get the death penalty than a white when the
victim is white. At present nearly half of those currently
sitting on the nation's death rows are black." (Afrocentric
News 2000)
In the latter part of the 19th century, anti-lynching
campaigns sprung up throughout the North and South, led for
almost 50 years by the National Association of Colored Women
and the NAACP. Ida B. Wells, an African American teacher,
journalist and suffragist, was a leading figure in this
struggle. To help debunk the racist theory that lynching was
justified to "protect the sanctity of white womanhood," the
Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching
encouraged white women to join this anti-racist campaign.
Today, institutionalized lynching persists in the police
killings of Black youths, like the recent shooting of unarmed
Timothy Stansbury in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant community.
The incarceration of Black political prisoners for decades in
the prison-industrial complex further illustrates how super-
exploitation under capitalism, which keeps so many African
Americans in poverty, continues to be maintained through
state terror.
The United States is the most powerful imperialist country
largely due to the national oppression of Black people and
other peoples of color. African American activists, in
raising the political demand for reparations and targeting
U.S. corporations and banks that profited off the sweat and
blood of unpaid African slaves, are recognizing this
inherited, endemic super-exploitation. The righteous demand
for reparations, which deserves the classwide solidarity of
all working people, is a small price to pay for all the
centuries of immense suffering and degradation that African
Americans have had to endure and fight back against.
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