Writes: Leonard Pitts Jr.
This will be a history of rope.
It strikes me that such a history is desperately needed just now. It seems the travesty in Jena, La., has spawned a ghastly trend. Remember how white students at Jena High placed nooses in a tree last year to communicate antipathy toward their black classmates? Now it’s happening all over.
A noose is left for a black workman at a construction site in the Chicago area. In Queens, a woman brandishes a noose to threaten her black neighbors. A noose is left on the door of a black professor at Columbia University. And that’s just last week. Go back a little further and you have similar incidents at the University of Maryland in College Park, at a police department on Long Island, on a Coast Guard cutter and in a bus maintenance garage in Pittsburgh.
Mark Potok, the director of the Intelligence Project of the Southern Poverty Law Center, told USA Today, “For a dozen incidents to come to the public’s attention is a lot. I don’t generally see noose incidents in a typical month. We might hear about a handful in a year.”
The superintendent of schools in Jena famously dismissed the original incident as a “prank.” It was an astonishing response, speaking volumes about the blithe historical ignorance of people who have found it convenient not to peer too closely at the atrocities of the past lest they be accidentally … moved.
But watching this trend unfold, it occurs to me that maybe what we need here is the opposite of ignorance. Maybe what we need is information. Maybe what we need is a history of rope.
A history of rope would have to include, in 1904, Luther Holbert and his wife, who had their fingers chopped off and handed out as souvenirs. Holbert was beaten so badly one of his eyes came out. It hung by a thread. A large corkscrew was used to bore into the couple’s flesh. It tore out big chunks of them each time it was withdrawn. A rope was used to tie them to the tree.
A history of rope would have to include, in 1917, Rufus Moncrief, who was beaten senseless by a mob. They used a saw to cut off his arms and otherwise mutilated him. The mob hanged Moncrief. Then, for good measure, they hanged his dog. Ropes were used for both.
A history of rope would have to include, in 1918, Mary Turner, burned alive in Valdosta. A man used a hog-splitting knife to slash her swollen stomach. The baby she had carried nearly to term tumbled out and managed two cries before the man crushed its head beneath his heel. A rope was used to tie Turner upside down in a tree.
A history of rope would include thousands of Turners, Moncriefs and Holberts. It would range widely across the geography of this nation and the years of the past two centuries. A history of rope would travel from Cairo, Ill., in 1909 to Fort Lauderdale, Fla., in 1935 to Urbana, Ohio, in 1897 to Wrightsville in 1903, to Leitchfield, Ky., in 1913 to Newbern, Tenn. in 1902. And beyond.
You might say the country has changed since then, and it has. The problem is, it’s changing again.
It feels as if in recent years we the people have backward traveled from even the pretense of believing our loftiest ideals. It has become fashionable to decry excessive “political correctness,” deride “diversity,” sneer at the “protected classes.” Code words sanding down hatred’s rough edge. “State’s rights” for the new millennium. And now, out come the nooses. Just a prank, the man says.
Mary Turner would argue otherwise. I find it useful to remember her, useful to be reminded of things we would rather forget. To remember her is to understand that there is no prank here.
A history of rope would drown your conscience in blood.
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 About The Author: Leonard Pitts, Jr. is a nationally-syndicated columnist and winner of the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary.
He was originally hired by the Miami Herald to critique music, but within a few years he received his own column in which he dealt extensively with race, politics, and culture. He lives in Bowie, Maryland.
He has won awards for his writing from the Society of Professional Journalists and the American Society of Newspaper Editors, and was first nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 1993, eventually claiming the honor in 2004. He is also the author of the bestselling book Becoming Dad: Black Men and the Journey to Fatherhood.
Pitts gained national recognition for his widely-circulated column of September 12, 2001, “We’ll Go Forward From This Moment,” in which he described the toughness of the American spirit even in the face of such a horrible attack.
In June 2007, Pitts was the subject of a campaign of death threats and harassment by neo-Nazis angry at a column he wrote about two whites raped and murdered in Knoxville, Tennessee. In his column addressing the murders, Pitts stated “for the crackpots, incendiaries and flat-out racists who have chosen this tragedy upon which to take an obscene and ludicrous stand. I have four words for them and any other white Americans who feel themselves similarly victimized. Cry me a river.”
More death threats were made in April 2008 before his appearance at the University of Puget Sound.
| Read More About Leonard Pitts Jr. | Visit his website at www.leonardpittsjr.com.
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REFERENCES:
1. Southern Horrors and Other Writings; The Anti-Lynching Campaign of Ida B. Wells, 1892-1900
2. At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America
3. Contempt of Court: The Turn Of-The-Century Lynching That Launched 100 Years of Federalism
4. Getting Away with Murder (Jane Addams Honor Book (Awards))
5. Lynching in Mississippi: A History, 1865-1965
6. A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature
7. In Jena and Beyond, Nooses Return as a Symbol of Hate
8. On Culture: Symbols of Hatred in the Shadows
9. Facing Down The Status Quo: African American Museum’s Inaugural Exhibition Shows The Stalwarts of ‘Resistance
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