Legacy of lynching

NOW that the anti-racism movement has become global, every issue is about the history of American slavery or racial profiling.

It is debatable whether the racist tweets of the American president are a distraction from his ability to handle the out-of-control coronavirus; or whether the current virtue signalling of institutionalised racism is a distraction from having to handle the horrors of the global COVID-19 pandemic.

The penultimate racist tweet of “the most powerful person in the world” was to call the Alabama NASCAR noose incident “a hoax” and demand an apology from the driver, who sports a “I can’t breathe black lives matter” T-shirt and an American unity flag face mask. ( He made no secret of his opposition to the ubiquitous Confederate flag)

While the rope door-pull of the garage stable has been pronounced as not a hate crime by the FBI, American discourses on Youtube are perpetually about black lynching. According to one report there were over 4000 racial terror lynchings in America in the first half of the 20th century.

There have also been around 80 unexplained black male deaths by hanging in public places in the past few years.

Ironically the American revolutionary Charles Lynch, who coined the phrase “lynch law”, acquitted several black men of murder charges.

Mothers whose teenage sons’ hangings were ruled suicides by coroners are demanding new investigations. The white supremacy motivation, apparently, is not dissimilar to that during the antebellum Reconstruction era.

The Jim Crow museum reveals how popular lynching was for photo ops. The theme of the ritual torture associated with lynch law has permeated movies from Birth of A Nation to Mississippi Burning.

With the spike in lynching during the Depression, songs became a medium for the theme. Although Irving Berlin’s As Thousands Cheer has never been revived, Billie Holiday did a rendition of the 1933 Strange Fruit.

Some of the canons of American literature also contain near lynching like Huckleberry Finn or To Kill A Mockingbird.

In the current culture wars where statues are desecrated or removed, black-lives-matter activists are advocating memorials be placed at all the famous/infamous lynching locations.

WILLIAM ROSS, Cranbrook.