Lynching discussed during lecture series

William Kelly
Photographer/Writer

Deborah H. Barnes, Associate Professor of English at Jackson State University, hosted: “The Noose and Pyre: Lynching and Racial Violence as Social Control,” on March 17 in Ayer Hall at the Margaret Walker Center for the Study of the African-American Experience.

Lynching is a form of public humiliation in which a person is hung by the neck with rope until dead, usually from a massive tree. This concept was used by white supremacists to exert dominance and discipline through fear.

“There’s really nothing more to say except why? But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how,” said Barnes as she quoted a line from a Tony Morrison novel. “Today I want us to talk about how lynching was able to proliferate in the way that it did. Most people would say for fifty-one years when in fact it was much much longer.”

Barnes added: “The statistic is that two to three people were lynched every week for fifty-one years. That means that so many people were lynched that people stopped thinking about it. Think about how so many people are shot, if there is not a ground swell of resistance then you say ‘Lord they done shot another one’ and you go on. It got to the point that people didn’t even pay attention to it because it had just become understood as part of what the culture is.”

Barnes continued to explain how lynching was a social control that made it manageable for people to have their way and how lynching was not only related to African-Americans but also other ethnicities.

“Most people think of lynching as the illegal murder of black men and women, mostly in the south, when in fact people were lynched in every state of the union except three,” said Barnes. “I found a news article that said 12 Chinese people were lynched at one time in a city in Idaho.”

Barnes stated that she searched for those Chinese victims for ten years and only recently found the information about two weeks ago. She also stated that according to the novel, “Driven Out,” Chinese people were lynched and purged and murdered wholesale by the thousands in this country but we never hear about it because it is constructed as a “black thing.”

Many people present at the lecture were shocked to learn the deeper truth behind lynching, particularly students.

“I feel as if this presentation was very beneficial because if I would’ve never came here I would’ve never known that not only blacks were lynched, but also Chinese, Mexicans, and many more,” said Felecia Dennis, a junior criminal justice major from Memphis Tenn. “I learned that we as the 21st Century became so blinded by the trend to get hip to the new life that we forgot that the 19th Century got us here.”

The series will continue with: “The Furrow of His Brow: The Lost History of Black Lynch Mobs” at 6 p.m., Tuesday, March 24, at the Fannie Lou Hamer Institute@COFO at Jackson State University; and “Written in Blood: Discourses in Lynching,” at 6 p.m., Tuesday, March 31 at Gallery1 at Jackson State University.

The lectures are free and open to the public.