Home Depot bans rope sales due to nooses

LOUISVILLE, Ky. – Last week, Rob Ball urgently needed some rope.

A vegetable farmer in eastern Jefferson County, Ball had 300 tomato plants that needed stringing and an old friend had offered to help while in town that particular Friday.

So Ball paid a visit to his local Home Depot, where he hoped to buy several hundred feet of the store’s quarter-inch twisted nylon rope.

To his dismay, a Home Depot salesman informed Ball of a new store policy: Customers can no longer buy rope by the foot.

“My next question, of course, was, ‘Well, why not?’ ” Ball said. “He replied by saying, ‘Because some people have been making nooses out of them.’ ”

As protests over racial injustice have continued to rage across the country, Home Depot opted last month to remove spools of rope from the aisles of its nearly 2,000 U.S. stores.

The move was indeed prompted by past incidents in which customers and employees found nooses tied on the stores’ rope spools, a Home Depot spokeswoman confirmed.

Among those past incidents was the discovery of a noose at a Pittsburgh area store in 2016 and another at a store in Delaware last year. Most recently, two nooses were discovered at a store in Charlotte, North Carolina, last month.

“We’ve had instances around the country where people have used rope to create hate symbols,” said Home Depot spokeswoman Margaret Smith. “We’re not going to tolerate it. So out of an abundance of caution we temporarily removed spooled rope from our aisles.”

For many, the noose is more than just a loop knot. Many associate nooses with lynchings and other violence against African Americans.

Between 1877 and 1934, the lynching of at least 186 African Americans took place in Kentucky, according to data compiled by The University of Washington.

Just last month, the discovery of a noose in the Talladega Superspeedway garage assigned to NASCAR driver Bubba Wallace, who is Black, prompted a federal investigation into the possibility of a hate crime.

The FBI concluded it was not a hate crime. The noose had been there as a garage door pull since last year, long before Wallace arrived.