Lynching Remark Puts Spotlight on Mississippi Senate Race

[struggle4progress]

Nov. 12, 2018, at 8:11 p.m.

BY EMILY WAGSTER PETTUS and ERRIN HAINES WHACK, Associated Press

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) ... Republican Cindy Hyde-Smith is facing former congressman and former U.S. agriculture secretary Mike Espy, a black Democrat, in a runoff Nov. 27. She was captured on video praising a supporter by declaring, "If he invited me to a public hanging, I'd be on the front row" ...

"It really rocked folks," said Democrat Rukia Lumumba, co-director of The Electoral Justice Project and a native Mississippian whose family has deep roots in the state's politics and civil rights activism. "The fact that she has yet to apologize, to recognize the impact of her comments or that people have suffered ... I hope it makes us feel the urgency" ...

... Buoyed by Democrat Doug Jones' victory in the U.S. Senate race in Alabama last year, Democrats have been organizing in Mississippi for months. Black voters in particular have powered the effort, seeing it as a moment for generational change ...

According to the NAACP, 4,743 lynchings occurred in the United States between 1882 and 1968, and nearly 73 percent of the victims were black. Mississippi had 581 during that time — more than any other state ...

https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2018-11-12/mississippi-senators-public-hanging-remark-draws-rebuke

[elleng]

1. 'Apologies for emailing you so late, but we're running out of time.

Our deadline to help elect Democrat Mike Espy to the Senate is TOMORROW.

If we can't help him raise $2,853 before then, we'll have NO hope of adding another Democrat to the Senate.

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But here we are -- after the most historic election in American history -- fighting overtime to send this incredible Democrat to Washington.

This race is still so close. And we know we can still win!

We can deal Trump an embarrassing defeat and get one step closer to blocking his agenda in Congress.

And that's because of supporters like you!

But with so much at stake and no time left, we have to ask again:

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We can win this!

Congressional Black Caucus PAC

[underthematrix]

2. This is how journalists should respond to her hanging comments

Link to tweet

[TreasonousBastard]

3. Not to excuse her, since she should know better, but I gotta say that every time I hear...

"public hanging" I think of the Old West and bank robbers, not lynchings. A public hanging is an extreme sort of justice while a lynching is a bloody murder-- for which one could be hanged. And I may be wrong, but I never thought of lynchings as "public", more like midnight deep in the woods, although no doubt it was popular enough to happen in daylight at times.

Is this the way it really is in Mississippi? After hundreds of years of hanging killers, rustlers, thieves, rogues, infidels, blasphemers and witches the first thing one thinks of is not the gallows and the criminal, but the tree and its "strange fruit"?

Anyway, the woman is showing her own colors-- if the locals are nothing like the thinking around here and do take such offense at the term, she's an idiot for not making a public apology for upsetting everyone.

[jaysunb]

6. Public hanging of Blacks was regularly a public event. Especially in Mississippi

But those photo's are not seen on TV....like western melodramas.....

[Blue_true]

7. In Mississippi, Blacks were lynched in broad daylight at one time.

And whole towns attended the lynchings and pictures were taken of the citizens around the dead men, the dead men still hanging, often shoeless, led to their deaths that way. At best, her statement is clueless given the state's history, at worst, she was trying to reopen past history to bring in racist White support to her. I hope that she has awakened fair minded Whites and all minorities in Mississippi and that they show up to defeat her.

[Hermit-The-Prog]

9. The Infamous Lynching Site That Still Stands in Mississippi

[...]

The steel-framed span loomed thirty feet above the muddy water. At the far end of the hundred-foot deck, the forest swallowed up a dirt road that used to lead somewhere. Years of traffic rumbling across the bridge had worn parallel streaks into the deck, and heavy runner boards covered holes in rotted planks. Metal rails sagged in spots. Still, the reddish-brown truss beams on either side stood stiff and straight, and overhead braces cast shadows on the deck below. On that rusty frame, between lines of vertical rivets, someone had painted a skull and crossbones and scribbled: “Danger, This Is You.”

“This,” Sumrall announced to Cumbler, his new recruit, “is where they hang the Negroes.”

“The way he said it,” Cumbler remembered, “it could have happened a hundred years ago, or last week.”

Now closed to traffic, the Hanging Bridge still stands. In 1918, nearly a century ago and just five weeks after Armistice Day, a white mob hanged four young blacks—two brothers and two sisters, both pregnant—from its rails. This was several days after their white boss turned up dead. “People says they went down there to look at the bodies,” a local woman recalled fifty years later, “and they still see those babies wiggling around in the bellies after those mothers was dead.” When the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)—an organization less than ten years old at the time— demanded an investigation, Mississippi governor Theodore Bilbo told them to go to hell.

[...]

http://time.com/4314310/hanging-bridge-excerpt-mississippi-civil-rights/

[Progressive Jones]

4. Send this MAGA HAG cracker packing! nt

[Polybius]

5. Any new post-election polls on this race?

I haven't seen any.

[Hermit-The-Prog]

8. put names to people

"This list is not all inclusive. There were other lynchings which occurred where the victims are unidentified."
http://www.ancestraltrackers.net/ms/lynchings.htm

The length of the list of names from the above is shocking.

[Hermit-The-Prog]

10. distrust of gov't, racism, isolation, economics, courts, and no consequences

Do any of the conditions outlined in the following sound familiar?

The Negro Holocaust: Lynching and Race Riots in the United States,1880-1950

[...]

The lynching of Negroes, Cutler states, “can only be justified on no other ground than that the law as formulated and administered has proved inadequate to deal with the situation—that there has been governmental inefficiency...”9

Lynchings occurred most commonly in the smaller towns and isolated rural communities of the South where people were poor, mostly illiterate, and where there was a noticeable lack of wholesome community recreation. The people who composed mobs in such neighborhoods were usually small land holders, tenant farmers and common laborers, whose economic status was very similar to that of the Negro. They frequently found Black men economic competitors and bitterly resented any Negro progress. Their starved emotions made the raising of a mob a quick and simple process, and racial antagonism made the killing of Negroes a type of local amusement which broke the monotony of rural life. Although most participants in the lynching mobs were from the lower strata of Southern white society, occasionally middle and upper class whites took part, and generally condoned the illegal activity. Many Southern politicians and officials supported “lynch-law”, and came to power on a platform of race prejudice.

Lynching was a local community affair. When the sentiment of a community favored lynching the laws were difficult or impossible to enforce. State authorities often attempted to prevent lynchings, but seldom punished the mob participants. Because of the tight hold on the courts by local public opinion, lynchers were rarely ever indicted by a grand jury or sentenced. The judge, prosecutor, jurors and witnesses—all white—were usually in sympathy with the lynchers. If sentenced, the participants in the lynch mobs were usually pardoned. Local police and sheriffs rarely did anything to defend Negro citizens and often supported lynchings. Arthur Raper estimated, from his study of one hundred lynchings, that “at least one-half of the lynchings are carried out with police officers participating, and that in nine-tenths of the others the officers either condone or wink at the mob action.”

[...]

http://teachersinstitute.yale.edu/curriculum/units/1979/2/79.02.04.x.html

There should be non-rewarding consequences for candidates for public office joking about public hangings in the state with the historical record of being number one in lynchings carried out.

[Hermit-The-Prog]

11. The terror of lynching haunts black Americans again

Last edited Wed Nov 14, 2018, 09:23 PM - Edit history (1)

The terror of lynching haunts black Americans again

Steven W Thrasher
Wed 24 May 2017

Lynching is back in America’s headlines. On Saturday, an African American student, Richard Collins III, was stabbed and killed on the campus of the University of Maryland in what was widely – and rightly – called a lynching. That same day, the Mississippi state representative Karl Oliver wrote on Facebook that people who supported the removal of Confederate memorials “should be LYNCHED”.

Both cases are grotesque, obscene, and very reflective of our present racist crisis embodied by the Trump era.

The man who reportedly killed Collins was a white student named Sean Ubanski, who is said to have been involved with a Facebook group called Alt-Reich: Nation.

A lynching is a spectacular murder that serves as a warning to a whole group, as did Jim Crow-era hangings and 2015’s murders at Emanuel AME Church. The Collins killing reinforces the fear in African Americans that there is no space or activity – not buying Skittles in a suburb, buying a toy in a store, or going to a party – which is safe for us.

[...]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/may/24/lynching-threats-mississippi-racism-richard-collins

It's not just in the remote past, but it should be. It should not be resurrected by someone seeking public office.