Hangman’s noose keeps cropping up
WASHINGTON — It was the beginning of the night shift last Wednesday at the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia, a secure facility that manufactures money, when a white male coin maker strode across the factory floor to the workstation of an African American colleague. He was carrying a piece of rope.
The rope had an official purpose: to seal coin bags once they were full. But the worker, who operates the machinery used to make coins, instead looped and twisted it into a hangman’s noose, according to Rhonda Sapp, president of the Mint workers’ union. She was soon deluged with calls and text messages from outraged employees.
The episode was confirmed by a spokeswoman for the Treasury Department with a statement saying that the agency has “absolutely zero tolerance” for such hateful displays and that authorities were investigating. It is the latest in a series of reports this year involving nooses — especially in the nation’s capital — that point to the return of the hangman’s rope as a potent expression of racial animus.
Nooses, long a powerful symbol of bigotry and hatred directed at African Americans, have been found hanging from a tree outside the Hirshhorn Museum on the National Mall; in a gallery at the National Museum of African American History and Culture; outside an elementary school; and on the campus of American University, where bananas with hateful messages were found hanging from nooses on the same day that a black woman was set to assume the presidency of the university’s Student Government Association.
“To me, a noose is lynching,” said Taylor Dumpson, who is the first black woman to become president of American University’s student government. “That’s immediately what comes to my mind, that someone is going to hang you, that someone is going to die. That’s a very chilling thing.”
Nooses have also been found in recent months at a middle school in Florida, at a high school in North Carolina and at a fraternity house at the University of Maryland. Also in Maryland, two 19-year-olds are being prosecuted in the hanging of a noose outside a middle school.
Advocacy groups who track hate crimes say the rash of noose cases is part of an uptick in hate crimes, fueled by the coarsening of public conversation that began during last year’s presidential campaign, and has continued amid bitter divisions over the election outcome.
“We are in a moment right now where we certainly have not only heightened awareness, but a greater frequency of hate incidents,” said Jonathan Greenblatt, chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League.