Lynching was Southern Heritage!!!

By John Burl Smith author of “The 400th From Slavery to Hip Hop!”

Two days ago, a courageous young black candidate running for the US Senate in Kentucky, Charles Booker produced a video with a noose around his neck. His statement calls the current Sen. Rand Paul out regarding his refusal to support any ban on assault weapons and many of his votes have reflected his support for the NRA and America’s racist past. Yes, I said it out loud! Yes, America past I steeped in racism, and Kentucky, like Texas and the rest of the South, is like a wellspring for the United States of America. I made this point in my, “Everybody is talking about the Wrong Thing!” post week and cover the topic extensively in “The 400th From Slavery to Hip Hop!” Anyone who doubts my assessment, if they are advised to read my book, need only read Ralph Ginsburg’s book “One Hundred Years of Lynching,” or James Allen’s pictorial expose’s “Without Sanctuary”!

Booker’s video presentation was a poignant wake up to Kentucky voters and the rest of America to the fact that mass murders with guns today are no different than lynching in the late 1800 to 1950. When Woodrow Wilson was elected president in 1912, he used lynching to make “white supremacy” the goal of the federal government. Again, like today and mass gun violence, when Wilson came into office, lynchings occurred in forest and dark swamps in the dead of night. No one could foresee that in the 1920s and 30s lynching would become a “spectator sport,” attended by 10 to 15,000 white men, women and children. These skeptical lynchings became a part of American culture, on the way to becoming an American “cottage industry” that produced post cards that sold into the millions. White families that attended lynchings created family photo albums, which contained pieces of chard body parts and fabric collected from lynched victims.

I believed Booker saw this same potential in what is happening in America today with mass shooting and defending gun ownership by Republicans. Synonymous to killing Black people, “which not against the law,” like the millions of assault weapons, lynching grew in popularity, until murdering Black people was one big party for white people. It is difficult today to think of white people as that depraved, so the only way one can come to see the danger of overturning Roe v. Wade for women is to find a counterpart in American history. However, the Equal Justice Initiative, an organization in Montgomery, AL has researched this topic extensively and established that nearly 5,000 lynching took place in the former confederate states alone between 1900 and 1950. More importantly, during the period of “the Red Summer of 1919,” thousands of Black communities were “sacked and burned” and inhabitants murdered in places like “Black Wall Street,” in Talus, OK, the Southside of Chicago, IL, East St. Louis, IL, even Washington, DC, while Pres. Woodrow Wilson watched the movie “Birth of A Nation.”

The amazing thing about lynchings—extrajudicial murders—they were cited by so-called white Christians as the only way to protect white women from Black men, while in truth, lynching was about holding on to political power. The spark that set everything in motion was the Supreme Court’s ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson. Today it seems Booker saw the US back there again and back then a Supreme Court was the first step in establishing “white supremacy.” I think Booker’s video presentation was calculated to be, a not so subtle, indication of what could follow, if Samuel Alito’s draft opinion in Roe v. Wade becomes the law of the land, since Alito cited “burning witches,” as something justified. Again, Booker video intimated or at least suggested, what can happen when the rights of a minority become the target of a majority. My point is that in an enlightened society, like America, lynching was only outlaw in 2022, but still is not a crime.

Republicans are up in arms, calling for Booker’s “scalp” because he had the temerity to make a connection to lynching, but it is Republicans who have always used race to gain and hold on to political power. Their current political dominance is due to Ronald Reagan’s “southern strategy,” “barefaced racism,” which Republicans were wedded to until Donald Trump. Today Republicans are proud to march under Trump’s racist flag, like white men were rabid for lynching, during what I call the “Dark Age angry white men mob madness” era 1900s to 1950. I wish I was a registered voter in Kentucky, Booker would be my man, but we have a similar fight for Stacey Abrams against another “diehard southern heritage supporter,” like Rand Paul!!!