[Vision2020] Pitts column, below

[keely emerinemix]

Visionaires,

Keely finally figures out hi-tech, with thanks once again to her son:

keely

Recalling rope's horrors
Leonard Pitts Jr.
Miami Herald
October 15, 2007
 
This will be a history of rope.
 
It strikes me that such a history is desperately needed just now. It seems 
the travesty in Jena, La., has spawned a ghastly trend. Remember how white 
students at Jena High placed nooses in a tree last year to communicate 
antipathy toward their black classmates? Now it's happening all over.
 
A noose is left for a black workman at a construction site in the Chicago 
area. In Queens, a woman brandishes a noose to threaten her black 
neighbors. A noose is left on the door of a black professor at Columbia 
University. And that's just last week. Go back a little further and you 
have similar incidents at the University of Maryland in College Park, at a 
police department on Long Island, on a Coast Guard cutter, in a bus 
maintenance garage in Pittsburgh.
 
 
Mark Potok, the director of the Intelligence Project of the Southern 
Poverty Law Center told USA Today: "For a dozen incidents to come to the 
public's attention is a lot. I don't generally see noose incidents in a 
typical month. We might hear about a handful in a year."
 
The superintendent of schools in Jena famously dismissed the original 
incident as a "prank." It was an astonishing response, speaking volumes 
about the blithe historical ignorance of people who have found it 
convenient not to peer too closely at the atrocities of the past lest they 
be accidentally … moved.
 
But watching this trend unfold, it occurs to me that maybe what we need 
here is the opposite of ignorance. Maybe what we need is information. 
Maybe what we need is a history of rope.
 
A history of rope would have to include, in 1904, Luther Holbert and his 
wife, who had their fingers chopped off and handed out as souvenirs. 
Holbert was beaten so badly one of his eyes came out. It hung by a thread. 
A large corkscrew was used to bore into the couple's flesh. It tore out 
big chunks of them each time it was withdrawn. A rope was used to tie them 
to a tree.
 
A history of rope would have to include, in 1917, Rufus Moncrief, who was 
beaten senseless by a mob. They used a saw to cut off his arms and 
otherwise mutilated him. The mob hanged Moncrief. Then, for good measure, 
they hanged his dog. Ropes were used for both.
 
A history of rope would have to include, in 1918, Mary Turner, burned 
alive in Valdosta, Ga. A man used a hog-splitting knife to slash her 
swollen stomach. The baby she had carried nearly to term tumbled out and 
managed two cries before the man crushed its head beneath his heel. A rope 
was used to tie Turner upside down in a tree.
 
A history of rope would include thousands of Turners, Moncriefs and 
Holberts. It would range widely across the geography of this nation and 
the years of the last two centuries. A history of rope would travel from 
Cairo, Ill., in 1909 to Fort Lauderdale, Fla., in 1935 to Urbana, Ohio, in 
1897 to Wrightsville, Ga., in 1903, to Leitchfield, Ky., in 1913 to 
Newbern, Tenn., in 1902. And beyond.
 
You might say the country has changed since then, and it has. The problem 
is, it's changing again.
 
It feels as if in recent years we the people have traveled backward from 
even the pretense of believing our loftiest ideals. It has become 
fashionable to decry excessive "political correctness," 
deride "diversity," sneer at the "protected classes." Code words sanding 
down hatred's rough edge. "State's rights" for the new millennium. And 
now, out come the nooses. Just a prank, the man says.
 
Mary Turner would argue otherwise. I find it useful to remember her, 
useful to be reminded of things we would rather forget. To remember her is 
to understand that there is no prank here.
 
A history of rope would drown your conscience in blood.
 
 


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