Lynching

In recent months, the subject of lynching has found its way into public consciousness. Nooses have mysteriously appeared on college campuses, residential areas, and worksites. A Golf Channel commentator was recently suspended for suggesting that Tiger Woods' competitors should perhaps take him out in a back alley and lynch him, apparently as a means of restoring competitive balance to the tour. GOLF magazine, in an effort to sensationalize its coverage of the incident, emblazoned its cover with a large hangman's noose. The editor was subsequently fired. To get some perspective on the significance of lynching in American history, it is instructive to examine writings from that period.

W.E.B. DuBois, as editor of the NAACP's Crisis magazine, devoted considerable space in speaking out against lynching, which he regarded as a manifestation of American lawlessness and violence and a means of social control. In an August 1927 editorial, Lynchings, he wrote:

The horrible lynchings in the United States, even the almost incredible burning of human beings alive, have raised not a ripple of interest, not a single protest from the United States Government, scarcely a word from the pulpit and not a syllable from the Defenders of the Republic, the 100% Americans, or the propagandists of the army and navy. And this in spite of the fact that the cause of the Louisville, Mississippi, bestiality was, according to the Memphis Commercial-Appeal "widespread indignation at the refusal of the Negroes traveling in slow, second-handed Fords to give road to faster cars." And yet hiding and concealing this barbarism by every resource of American silence, we are sitting in council at Geneva and Peking and trying to make the world believe we are a civilized nation