Amazon closes US construction site after seven nooses discovered
Amazon has closed a construction site in Windsor, Connecticut, after seven nooses were discovered there in the past month.
The retail giant is offering a $100,000 reward for more information on the nooses, the first of which appeared on 27 April, hanging from a steel beam of the building.
Five more ropes that resembled a noose were found throughout the building two days later, but Amazon kept construction going until a seventh noose was discovered on Wednesday afternoon.
Nooses are a symbol of racial terrorism that evoke the more than 4,384 lynchings of people of color by white people which occurred in the US from 1877 and 1950. There was an increase in occurrences of nooses being used as an anti-Black intimidation tactic after Donald Trump became president, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Connecticut’s branch of the civil rights group the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the CT NAACP State Conference, and the local Greater Hartford
NAACP condemned the incident on Thursday.
“These forms of hate crimes have had a detrimental stain on the current state of America’s reality and for them to hit so close to home and with such consistency, shows a robust disrespect for the not only human decency but also for our ancestors who lost their lives due to the hate represented within the knots in those ropes,” the NAACP said in a statement.
Representatives of the organization planned to talk with workers at the construction site to hear their concerns.
Carlos Best, an ironworker at the construction site, said at the press conference that he’s “seen a lot of racism” on the job, including “racial remarks” made about Black people.
“This is not the only construction site that these things occur on, and it has to stop sooner or later,” Best said. “I enjoy coming to work and doing my job, but I don’t enjoy experiencing racism on the job.”
Amazon said it is putting in place new security measures at the site during the closure, which began on Thursday and is expected to last at least until Monday. The reward money was also increased to $100,000 from $50,000.
“Hate, racism or discrimination have no place in our society and are certainly not tolerated by Amazon – whether at a site under construction like this one, or at one that we operate,” an Amazon spokeswoman, Kelly Nantel, said in a statement.
The Connecticut state police and agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have examined the site. FBI special agent David Sunderberg said in a statement to local news station WTNH: “The implications of a hanging noose anywhere are unacceptable and will always generate the appropriate investigative response.”