Black Men Being Lynched—Past History, or Present Day Reality?
May 18, 2015 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
In speaking to the situation facing Black and Latino people in the U.S.—mass incarceration and the school-to-prison pipeline, the criminalization and demonization of a whole generation of youth, the overt or just-below-the-surface racism prevalent in society, etc.—Carl Dix of the Revolutionary Communist Party has said what is taking place is a slow genocide that could easily become a fast genocide. The word “genocide” comes from the ancient root words “genos” (people) and “cide” (killing)—according to the UN, genocide is the deliberate imposition on a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group of “conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” This regular feature highlights aspects of this slow genocide.
“The ‘Bible Belt’ in the U.S. is also the Lynching Belt”
BAsics 5:5
On Monday morning, May 11, a passerby found the body of a Black man, Roosevelt Champion III, 43, hanging from a tree in Greensboro, Georgia. Greensboro is about 80 miles east of Atlanta. Roosevelt was hung by a tie-strap (nylon strap used to tie down cargo). His feet were scraping the ground, his knees were in a slightly buckled position, and there was no trauma to his body. The week before, Roosevelt had been questioned twice by the local police in connection with an investigation into the murder of a white woman. He was treated as a suspect, but they didn’t bring any charges at that time. Immediately after his body was discovered, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation was brought in to perform an investigation. One day later, the official story and results of the autopsy were made public: His death was pronounced a suicide.
A month and a half earlier, on March 19, Otis James Byrd, 54, was found hanging from a bedsheet in a tree in a small town in Claiborne County, Mississippi, 60 miles southwest of Jackson. Police reported that his feet were two feet off the ground, there was no sign of trauma or that he had stood on something. His nephew reported to the Los Angeles Times that the police told his family that Otis’ hands had been tied, but he was able to work his way out and tried to loosen the grip around his neck. When the newspaper asked the police if this is true, they wouldn’t confirm the story. There has been hardly any press or follow-up to this story since then, and the authorities have inferred it to be a suicide. His family has hired an attorney to open an independent investigation and demand that the authorities release the evidence they have collected. The family believes that Otis was murdered.
In August 2014, Lennon Lacy, 17, a Black high school football player, was found hanging by two belts from a wooden swing set in a predominantly white trailer park in Bladenboro, North Carolina. Local police ruled it a suicide, and the autopsy report recorded the cause of death as “asphyxia due to hanging.” Lennon’s girlfriend is white. His family and his girlfriend say it was a lynching—bringing to mind the bitter story of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old who was murdered in Mississippi 50 years ago by white racists for allegedly flirting with a white woman.
This is not happening in America in the time of the old Jim Crow era, it is happening today under the New Jim Crow, a time when Black and Brown people are being gunned down every day by police in this country, when 2.2 million people are in prison, nearly a million of whom are Black, when there are more Black men under the control of law enforcement than were enslaved in 1860. As Carl Dix has said, “This genocidal program is real... it’s illegitimate... it’s immoral... and it must be stopped.”
We have seen the people rise up in righteous rebellions in Ferguson and in Baltimore, along with tens of thousands taking to the streets in resistance all over the country, making it very clear that this needs to stop and we refuse to live this way. At the same time, racist KKK-types and white supremacist flag-wavers have re-emerged recently in events like “Flags Over Valdosta” in Valdosta, Georgia, which was in response to a protest at Valdosta State University by Eric Sheppard and several other Black students exposing this white supremacist system while stepping on the American flag. (See “Walking on the Flag Leads to a Shit Storm at a Georgia University.”)
There is more to investigate about what happened in the cases of each of the three men who were found hung, but one thing is for sure: The investigations were all conducted very quickly and came to the same conclusion—that these deaths were self-inflicted, despite very suspicious circumstances and serious questions raised by the families and others—an all too familiar official story.
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