Lynching

By Dr. E. Faye Williams, Esq.
TriceEdneyWire.com Columnist

I can’t completely or accurately articulate my elation upon witnessing President Biden signing the Emmett Till Antilynching Act into law on March 29, 2022. With his signature, he affirmed what Congress had acknowledged – that lynching was, indeed, a federal hate crime. My only question was, “Why has it taken so long?” In the past century, the effort to legally outlaw lynching federally failed over two-hundred times. I cannot and never have been able to understand how lynching could not have been determined as the physical embodiment of hatred.

This signing event brought a myriad of thoughts and memories to mind. The image of the NAACP “lynching flag” swirled through my mind. This flag with the inscribed words “A MAN WAS LYNCHED YESTERDAY” was flown from the window of the NAACP National Headquarters (NY) whenever a lynching had been confirmed in the US. Although named after Emmitt Till, who was brutally murdered in 1955, The Act recognizes the thousands of, mostly, African Americans who met their fate at the end of a noose or by some other diabolical means generated in the malignant minds of racists.

Reflecting on the events lodged in my mind, I thought of the lynching of Hayes and Mary Turner, the circumstances of which truly epitomize racial hatred. In 1918, in Morven, Georgia, 25-year-old Hayes Turner was accused of killing an abusive (white) landowner and subsequently lynched. Hayes’ 18-year-old wife Mary publicly opposed his lynching and threatened legal action against the white people who had murdered him. The following day, Mary was hanged upside down from a tree, doused with gasoline and motor oil, and set on fire. Mary was still alive when a member of the mob split her abdomen open with a knife and her unborn child fell on the ground. The baby was stomped and crushed as it fell to the ground. Her body was riddled with hundreds of bullets. Those actions can only be the product of hatred.

I also reflected on the year 2005 when Janet Langhart-Cohen, Mark Planning, Dick Gregory, and I walked into the offices of almost every U.S. Senator promoting a 2005 Antilynching Bill. Our goals were lofty. Among them was the renaming the Richard Russell Senate Building, named after the notorious and rabidly racist Georgia senator. This building was representative of the prestige and authority of one-half of our governing body and we felt its name was inconsistent with the spirit of our entire nation.

When we were unable to garner sufficient support for a name change, Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu offered an alternative – an apology from the U.S. Senate for failing to acknowledge and apologize for the nation’s legacy of lynching. The House of Representatives had done so. Several U.S. presidents had done so. It was unconscionable that an apology had never been offered by the U.S. Senate. After numerous meetings and intensive lobbying, the Senate finally offered its apologies. The refusals by the few senators who objected to the apology spoke volumes about their characters and those who supported them.

Now, at long last, we’ve gone past a mere “We’re sorry!” We have legal punitive enhancements in place to discourage the commission of crimes based upon hate and animus. We have finally put some teeth into our “bite out of crime.”

Realistically, a point of common logic informs us that legal deterrence only has limited success. Racial hatred, which is the fuel for the most egregious of violent offenses will continue to motivate acts of ill-will. Fortunately, we now have a tool to put racial hatred in its proper place.

Dr. E. Faye Williams, Esq. is a minister, a UN Peace Ambassador, President of the Dick Gregory Society, author of “Dick Gregory: Wake Up and Stay Woke,” and a columnist for Trice-Edney Wire Service.

This article originally published in the April 18, 2022 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.