This article is based on a presentation at a Party for Socialism and Liberation meeting in New York City.
Following 400 years of bondage, degradation, and massive oppression, the plight of African Americans in this so called “great nation” seems to be getting worse. We seem to be going backward in time, instead of moving forward.
As if the countless cases of racial profiling, police brutality and the murders of our brothers and sisters weren’t
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While these incidents are taking place, the media are portraying racism as a thing of the past, a practice that is long gone in this country. We know better.
We know that these nooses represent the divided reality in this country. These incidents of racist terror are not isolated. They grow from the same soil as the mass incarceration of young Black men. They grow from the same soil as the widespread unemployment sweeping Black and Latino communities.
The noose was initially used as an early tool of capital punishment, a death penalty for criminals. But from the Jim Crow era after Reconstruction until today, the noose has had a special meaning for African Americans. It is an imminent threat of racist violence directed at Black people.
Nooses were used to lynch thousands of African Americans by the Ku Klux Klan and other racist mobs. Lynching became an institution to enforce racist exploitation after slavery was formally abolished. Lynching turned into a grand affair, a grand public spectacle.
Whole towns would congregate to observe the victim being lynched. The victims were often mutilated. This was a celebrated, rejoiced event.
Today, the noose is being resurrected as the threat of choice for a new generation of racists—the same ilk as those who have always celebrated violence, hatred and oppression.
Modern lynchings
In 1981, a 19-year-old Black man, Michael Donald, was brutally murdered by KKK members who were mad that a jury had acquitted another unassociated Black man of killing a white cop. The Klan beat Michael with a tree limb, slit his throat and hung him from a tree across the street from his own house.
In 1998, James Byrd, a 49-year-old father of three, accepted a ride home from three white men in Jasper, Tex. Byrd was beaten, stripped, chained to a pickup truck and dragged for three miles to his death.
The very real trend of racist violence continues today. Recently, four white men beat Skylar McCormick, a 20-year-old African American. McCormick was brutalized with a baseball bat in Staten Island. This was just a few days after racist graffiti was found where a Harlem football team was set to play in Staten Island.
A hanging noose is a vivid reminder of this brutality. It is a reminder that the exploitative system we live under thrives on racism and violence against people of color.
Noose incidents
The Jena 6 case brought the symbol of the noose back into the limelight. The Jena 6 are the six young teens of Jena, La. who were arrested and face criminal charges for defending themselves from racist attacks against Black people in the town.
The case began with a few Black students sitting under a tree in their school yard. The next day, three nooses painted in school colors appeared on the tree.
What was the principal’s response to the students who performed this injustice? A three-day suspension. The principal said, “Kids will be kids, it was just a prank.”
There is no prank, no joke in a symbol of death by hanging, burning and mutilation.
Jena is not the only example. Recently, nooses have been found hanging in front of a dormitory at the University of Maryland, by a post office in New York City, in the Coast Guard Academy in Connecticut and at a police station in Long Island. And of course we all know about the noose hung on the door of a prominent African studies professor at Teachers College, Columbia University.
My friends and fellow activists and revolutionaries at Columbia are being bombarded by the administration to do some “soul-searching” about how this terrible “isolated incident” could occur at such an “enlightened” and “liberal” institution. “How could it happen here,” the top administrators ask. But we aren’t surprised.
We know that it is precisely in these ruling class fortresses, fenced off from the working class that surrounds them that racism and exploitation fester. This institution exists for one purpose only: to train the politicians and technocrats to carry on with capitalist exploitation.
New York City has a reputation in this country as a “liberal” city. That’s because of its concentration of multinational workers. But the ruling class is not “liberal” at all. It never has been. New York State was the largest importer of slaves in the United States, second only to South Carolina. Over 80 ships filled with African slaves arrived per day in the United States for 400 years.
Unity in struggle
The biggest question for socialists is what to do in the face of overt racist threats and violence?
The most important thing to remember is that this is not the Jim Crow era. The Civil Rights and Black Liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s made a huge step forward in changing the expectations of the African American community. We aren’t going back.
The biggest challenge that we face though is organization. And these racist attacks make it more important than ever to turn that around.
The Sept. 20 demonstration of 50,000 people in Jena—a town of 3,000—is a sign of the potential that is out there. The work we have been doing with the ANSWER Coalition (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) in spreading the word about the case, talking to people and collecting petitions, also shows the potential.
Imagine if this movement against racism could fuse with the movement to stop the imperialist wars on Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Sept. 20 demonstration came just a few days after the militant mass demonstration against the war in Washington on Sept. 15. Taken together, those two events give a sense of what a powerful, united movement against the racist ruling class could look like.
That is our perspective as revolutionaries. To unite all the struggles against racism, war, exploitation and oppression into one powerful fist against the tiny super-rich ruling class of bankers and owners.
We have a lot of work to do. Join us in building and uniting those struggles.
