April 29th, 2018: Lynching

[xoxoxoBruce]

♫ Lynch mob is a-comin'
Their scaffold’s in sight
♪ Lynch mob is a-comin'
There's a lynchin' tonight
♪ Slavery was defeated
The war lost don’tcha know
♪ But we still keep killin’
Thanks to Jim Crow

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, in Montgomery, Ala.

At the center is a grim cloister, a walkway with 800 weathered steel columns, all hanging from a roof. Etched on each column is the name of an American county and the people who were lynched there, most listed by name, many simply as “unknown.” The columns meet you first at eye level, like the headstones that lynching victims were rarely given. But as you walk, the floor steadily descends; by the end, the columns are all dangling above, leaving you in the position of the callous spectators in old photographs of public lynchings.

Hundreds of jars of soil from the sites of documented lynchings, collected by families of victims or community volunteers, are on display at the museum.

The magnitude of the killing is harrowing, all the more so when paired with the circumstances of individual lynchings, some described in brief summaries along the walk: Parks Banks, lynched in Mississippi in 1922 for carrying a photograph of a white woman; Caleb Gadly, hanged in Kentucky in 1894 for “walking behind the wife of his white employer”...

...Mary Turner, who after denouncing her husband’s lynching by a rampaging white mob, was hung upside down, burned and then sliced open so that her unborn child fell to the ground.

Still wonder why them niggers is so uppity these days?

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