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The Noose: A Symbol Of Hatred

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By JULIE BUCKNER ARMSTRONG

Published: February 24, 2008

When my friends and I were bored in high school, we entertained ourselves with the word game Hangman.

One player drew a scaffold and a noose, and below that a line for each letter of the word. The other player guessed letters hoping to fill in enough blanks to identify the word itself. Each missed letter resulted in one stick-figure body part drawn in.

The game's object was to beat death. For white teenagers like me, nooses held no real significance in post-civil-rights Alabama.

Fast forward 25 years. I am writing a book about the 1918 lynching of a pregnant woman named Mary Turner near Valdosta, Ga. The mob went after her because she threatened to press charges in her husband's lynching. After torturing and killing her, they cut out her fetus and stomped it into the ground.

A noose no longer symbolizes a harmless word game to me.

For anyone who knows the history of racially motivated lynchings in the United States, the noose is a powerful image of injustice and brutality. According to records kept at Tuskegee Institute (now University) from 1882 to 1968, 4,743 fell victim to lynching violence. Of those, 3,446 were African Americans.

All states have at least one lynching on the books. Some were responsible for more violence than others. Mississippi led the way with 581, followed by Georgia with 531, and Texas with 493. Florida came in seventh with 282 lynchings. Of those, about two dozen happened in the Tampa Bay area.

Practices differed before and after the Civil War. Before, lynchings usually involved a simple hanging to punish murderers and thieves. Communities also used lynching to purge dangerous outsiders: religious or ethnic minorities, and people with unfavorable political opinions.

After the Civil War, and especially in states of the former Confederacy, lynching took a more racial, vicious turn. Numbers rose dramatically. The year 1892 saw so many lynchings that historians now call it the "nadir," or low point, of race relations. Hangings often combined torture, mutilation, shooting and burning. Mobs ranged from small, secret groups that took their victims at night to crowds of thousands.

The larger, "spectacle lynchings," occurred in public locations such as courthouse squares. Entire families turned out. Gawkers brought picnics, took snapshots, grabbed body parts as souvenirs. Some spectacles, such as Claude Neal's 1934 lynching in Marianna, Fla., were advertised in advance.

Communities justified lynching as punishment for rape. Yet the slightest transgression could be labeled "sexual assault." Perhaps the most famous case was that of 15-year-old Emmett Till, killed in 1955 for whistling at a white woman in Money, Miss.

Another, less-famous case involved 15-year-old Willie James Howard, killed in Live Oak. In 1944, Howard signed a note to white girl "with love." As punishment, her father and two other men tied him up and forced him at gunpoint to jump into the Suwannee River. They tied his father to a tree and made him watch.

Anti-lynching activists argued that such savagery had nothing to do with crime and punishment. Racially motivated lynching had a political and economic basis. It was terrorism, meant to keep black people afraid of crossing segregation's boundaries. Lynching demonstrated white supremacy's power.

But power met resistance. From the 1880s through the 1950s, multiple individuals and organizations worked to end lynching. Ida B. Wells, the NAACP, the Commission on Interracial Cooperation and others used words as weapons. They investigated cases and published the gruesome facts in pamphlets, magazines, and books. They organized speaking tours, anti-lynching art shows and literary events.

They never changed laws. Congress tried, and repeatedly failed, to pass anti-lynching legislation. Few, if any, white people were ever prosecuted. But activists eventually did change hearts and minds. Writer, NAACP secretary and Jacksonville native James Weldon Johnson called the anti-lynching fight a battle to save "black America's body and white America's soul."

White America owes a soul-debt to people like Johnson for changing hearts and minds. Now many whites suffer amnesia.

Too many see a noose as nothing more than a game of Hangman, with blank lines underneath where meaningless words go. Historical ignorance prevents us from filling in those blanks with names. Mary Turner. Claude Neal. Emmett Till. Willie James Howard. Thousands more gone. These names should be remembered. History is not a child's game.

Julie Buckner Armstrong is an associate professor of English at the University of South Florida, St. Petersburg.

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