<\/a>William Kelly
\n<\/strong>Photographer\/Writer<\/strong><\/p>\n

Deborah H. Barnes, Associate Professor of English at Jackson State University, hosted: \u201cThe Noose and Pyre: Lynching and Racial Violence as Social Control,\u201d on March 17 in Ayer Hall at the Margaret Walker Center for the Study of the African-American Experience.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s really nothing more to say except why? But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how,\u201d said Barnes as she quoted a line from a Tony Morrison novel. \u201cToday 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Barnes added: \u201cThe 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 \u2018Lord they done shot another one\u2019 and you go on. It got to the point that people didn\u2019t even pay attention to it because it had just become understood as part of what the culture is.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cMost 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,\u201d said Barnes. \u201cI found a news article that said 12 Chinese people were lynched at one time in a city in Idaho.\u201d<\/p>\n

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, \u201cDriven Out,\u201d 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 \u201cblack thing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Many people present at the lecture were shocked to learn the deeper truth behind lynching, particularly students.<\/p>\n

\u201cI feel as if this presentation was very beneficial because if I would\u2019ve never came here I would\u2019ve never known that not only blacks were lynched, but also Chinese, Mexicans, and many more,\u201d said Felecia Dennis, a junior criminal justice major from Memphis Tenn. \u201cI 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

The series will continue with: \u201cThe Furrow of His Brow: The Lost History of Black Lynch Mobs\u201d at 6 p.m., Tuesday, March 24, at the Fannie Lou Hamer Institute@COFO at Jackson State University; and \u201cWritten in Blood: Discourses in Lynching,\u201d at 6 p.m., Tuesday, March 31 at Gallery1 at Jackson State University.<\/p>\n

The lectures are free and open to the public.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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