"It is well known that the black race is the most oppressed and most exploited of the human family...that the spread of capitalism and the discovery of the New World had as an immediate result the rebirth of slavery which was, for centuries, a scourge for the Negroes and a bitter disgrace for mankind. What everyone does not perhaps know is that after 65 years of so-called emancipation, American Negroes still endure atrocious moral and material sufferings, of which the most cruel and horrible is the custom of lynching."
(Excerpted from Ho Chi Minh's International Correspondence, No. 59, written in 1924.)
Ho Chi Minh, the anti-imperialist communist leader of the Vietnamese people, made this statement at the height of lynchings in the United States, mainly in the South. He spent a number of years living in the United States, which helped elevate his understanding of racist and class injustice, before returning to his beloved homeland. His observations were very illuminating, considering how cruelly the Vietnamese and other Indo-Chinese people were treated by French colonialism and U.S. militarism before their decades-long liberation struggle triumphed. Has there been any real qualitative social change for African-Americans in the United States since Ho Chi Minh's words were published 80 years ago? Has the legacy of horrific lynchings been tossed into the dustbin of history or is it still alive and well today?
With the rise of class society thousands of years ago, vigilante-sponsored violence along with state-orchestrated violence became commonplace. In the United States, people of color, labor organizers, Jewish immigrants, political radicals and others have certainly felt the wrath of lynchings by those who profess a white-supremacist mentality. Today, for African-Americans, lynchings remain a grim, painful reminder of almost three centuries of being treated as second- and third-class citizens.
Some historians trace "lynch law" to Col. Charles Lynch, who, during the war of independence by the 13 colonies, was based in Virginia to deal with British colonialists. Slavery was nothing more than institutionalized lynching, since African people were treated as less than human or as property. Historian John F. Callahan writes:
"During slavery there were numerous public punishments of slaves, none of which were preceded by trials or any other semblance of civil or judicial processes. Justice depended solely upon the slaveholder. Executions, whippings, brandings, and other forms of severe punishment, including sometimes the public separation of families, were meted out by authority or at the command of the master or his representative. Often, slaves from the plantation and, sometimes, nearby plantations were assembled and made to witness the punishment as an example of the master's absolute authority to wield the power of life and death over each and every slave."
("The Oxford Companion to African-American Literature," 1997.)
After the Civil War, freed slaves fought for complete liberation during the Reconstruction period. But lynchings increased dramatically when former Con federate officers and vengeful South ern planters regrouped to form the Ku Klux Klan, White Citizens Councils and other extra-legal groups to literally terrorize Black people back into semi-slavery conditions. With the Compromise of 1877, the federal government pulled out its troops and left the freed slaves at the mercy of these white-supremacist terrorists. As representatives of the interests of the ascendant Northern capitalist class, the government wanted to put a brake on fulfilling the same political and economic rights for Black workers in the South as those generally granted to Northern white male workers, thus keeping wages down by dividing workers along racial lines.
"Between 1882 (when reliable statistics were first collected) and 1968 (when the classic forms of lynching had disappeared), 4,743 persons died of lynching, 3,446 of them black men and women. Mississippi (539 black victims, 42 white) led this grim parade of death, followed by Georgia (492 black, 39 white), Texas (352 black, 141 white), Louisiana (335 black, 56 white), and Alabama (299 black, 48 white). From 1882 to 1901, the annual number nationally usually exceeded 100; 1892 had a record 230 deaths (161 black, 69 white). Although lynchings declined somewhat in the 20th century, there were still 97 in 1908 (89 black, 8 white), 83 in the racially-troubled postwar year of 1919 (76 black, 7 white, plus some 25 race riots), 30 in 1926 (23 black, 7 white), and 28 in 1933 (24 black, 4 white)."
(Robert L. Zangrando, "The Reader's Companion to American History," 1991)
As stated above, these statistics do not take into full account the victims in the "race riots" that began in the late 1800s. These massacres of Black people increased at the end of World War I when Black soldiers, who had been relegated to segregated units overseas, returned home expecting to be treated as full citizens. There was also the infamous Tulsa "race riot" in 1921, when white business owners instigated a massacre upon the prosperous Black community.
No white person was ever convicted of killing a Black person during these tragic episodes. This racist atmosphere was aided by the "separate but equal" law passed by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1896 that legalized racist Jim Crow laws in the South and other sections of the United States.
A recurring "excuse" for the lynchings of Black men has been the alleged rape of white women. Under slavery, while both African women and men were "owned" body and soul, the systematic rape of Black women was viewed as the "property right" of the white slavemaster. The recent revelation that the late arch-racist Strom Thurmond "fathered" a daughter during the 1920s with a Black servant reflects the persistence of semi-slavery conditions. Sexual relations between Black men and white women were socially viewed as taboo from the days of slavery until 1967, when miscegenation laws were struck down by the Supreme Court. This important concession won in the civil-rights struggle legalized the right of Black-white heterosexual couples to marry in the South.
Just the rumor that a Black man had raped a white woman would signal that a racist lynching would not be far behind. Fourteen-year-old Emmett Till was tortured to death by racists in 1955 for supposedly whistling at a white woman in Mississippi. The judicial system began instituting legal lynchings. Hundreds of Black men were executed after being charged with raping white women. Who could ever forget the Scottsboro case in the early 1930s, where nine young Black men were accused of gang-raping two white women in Alabama? The case gained worldwide attention as the Communist Party and other progressives came to the defense of these innocent Black youths. Even though the women finally admitted under oath that no rape had occurred, most of the youths were forced to spend many years in prison until public pressure forced the U.S. government to pardon them.
There are currently two important cases that could be considered modern-day Scottsboro cases. The case of Darryl Hunt was publicized in a Jan. 5 column by Bob Herbert, an African-American opinion writer for the New York Times. Herbert described how in 1984, Hunt, then 19 years old, was accused of the rape and murder of Deborah Sykes, a 25-year-old white woman in North Carolina. Forensic DNA testing had just been developed. During the original trial it proved that Hunt was innocent of the charge - but still he languished in jail for almost 20 years. Hunt's lawyers forced a public outcry, and finally exposé articles in the Winston-Salem Journal forced the courts to release Hunt this past December on a $250,000 bond pending a hearing in February. His lawyers are hoping that all murder charges will eventually be dropped by the prosecution. Only time will tell.
The second case has received more national attention. Marcus Dixon, 18, an academically gifted athlete, received a 10-year prison sentence in Rome, Georgia, after being found guilty of statutory rape - a misdemeanor - and aggravated child molestation, a felony. The judge sentenced him to 10 years in prison on the felony charge. Dixon testified that he had had consensual sex with a classmate who was three months shy of her 16th birthday at the time. He stated that she told him her father was a racist and that she feared he would kill the two if he caught them together. (New York Times, Jan. 22)
A jury found Dixon innocent of rape, sexual battery and aggravated assault, all felonies. Five of the jurors publicly stated that they would not have convicted Dixon on the other charges had they known about the prospect of a long prison sentence. Civil-rights forces, along with defense attorneys, have mounted a nationwide campaign of legal and political pressure on the Georgia Supreme Court to overturn this outrageous conviction and sentence.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson has assembled figures to show that the U.S. criminal justice system is still racist to the core:
"According to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund...between 1930 and 1996, more than half of all those executed have been African-Americans. When the crime (or accusation) is rape, the death penalty has almost always been exclusively reserved for blacks. Of the 453 men executed for rape since 1930, 405 have been black. Nearly all of them were executed in the South. They were arrested and convicted on the flimsiest evidence, usually no more than the word of a white woman. At the same time, not one white man received the death penalty for raping a black woman. There is no official record in any Southern state of a black man ever being executed for raping a black woman. The victims of all but 44 of the blacks executed in the South from 1930 through 1984 were white. Not much has changed over the years. A black is still 11 times more likely to get the death penalty than a white when the victim is white. At present nearly half of those currently sitting on the nation's death rows are black."
(Afrocentric News, 2000)
In the latter part of the 19th century, anti-lynching campaigns sprung up throughout the North and South, led for almost 50 years by the National Association of Colored Women and the NAACP. Ida B. Wells, an African-American teacher, journalist and suffragist, was a leading figure in this struggle. To help debunk the racist theory that lynching was justified to "protect the sanctity of white womanhood," the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching encouraged white women to join this anti-racist campaign.
Today, institutionalized lynching persists in the police killings of Black youths, like the recent shooting of unarmed Timothy Stansbury in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant community. The incarceration of Black political prisoners for decades in the prison-industrial complex further illustrates how super-exploitation under capitalism - which keeps so many African-Americans in poverty - continues to be maintained through state terror.
The United States is the most powerful imperialist country largely due to the national oppression of Black people and other peoples of color. African-American activists, in raising the political demand for reparations and targeting U.S. corporations and banks that profited off the sweat and blood of unpaid African slaves, are recognizing this inherited, endemic super-exploitation. The righteous demand for reparations, which deserves the classwide solidarity of all working people, is a small price to pay for all the centuries of immense suffering and degradation that African-Americans have had to endure and fight back against.
(Copyright: Workers World Service. Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this document, but changing it is not allowed. For more information contact Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011; via email: ww@workers.org.)
(Excerpted from Ho Chi Minh's International Correspondence, No. 59, written in 1924.)
Ho Chi Minh, the anti-imperialist communist leader of the Vietnamese people, made this statement at the height of lynchings in the United States, mainly in the South. He spent a number of years living in the United States, which helped elevate his understanding of racist and class injustice, before returning to his beloved homeland. His observations were very illuminating, considering how cruelly the Vietnamese and other Indo-Chinese people were treated by French colonialism and U.S. militarism before their decades-long liberation struggle triumphed. Has there been any real qualitative social change for African-Americans in the United States since Ho Chi Minh's words were published 80 years ago? Has the legacy of horrific lynchings been tossed into the dustbin of history or is it still alive and well today?
With the rise of class society thousands of years ago, vigilante-sponsored violence along with state-orchestrated violence became commonplace. In the United States, people of color, labor organizers, Jewish immigrants, political radicals and others have certainly felt the wrath of lynchings by those who profess a white-supremacist mentality. Today, for African-Americans, lynchings remain a grim, painful reminder of almost three centuries of being treated as second- and third-class citizens.
Some historians trace "lynch law" to Col. Charles Lynch, who, during the war of independence by the 13 colonies, was based in Virginia to deal with British colonialists. Slavery was nothing more than institutionalized lynching, since African people were treated as less than human or as property. Historian John F. Callahan writes:
"During slavery there were numerous public punishments of slaves, none of which were preceded by trials or any other semblance of civil or judicial processes. Justice depended solely upon the slaveholder. Executions, whippings, brandings, and other forms of severe punishment, including sometimes the public separation of families, were meted out by authority or at the command of the master or his representative. Often, slaves from the plantation and, sometimes, nearby plantations were assembled and made to witness the punishment as an example of the master's absolute authority to wield the power of life and death over each and every slave."
("The Oxford Companion to African-American Literature," 1997.)
After the Civil War, freed slaves fought for complete liberation during the Reconstruction period. But lynchings increased dramatically when former Con federate officers and vengeful South ern planters regrouped to form the Ku Klux Klan, White Citizens Councils and other extra-legal groups to literally terrorize Black people back into semi-slavery conditions. With the Compromise of 1877, the federal government pulled out its troops and left the freed slaves at the mercy of these white-supremacist terrorists. As representatives of the interests of the ascendant Northern capitalist class, the government wanted to put a brake on fulfilling the same political and economic rights for Black workers in the South as those generally granted to Northern white male workers, thus keeping wages down by dividing workers along racial lines.
"Between 1882 (when reliable statistics were first collected) and 1968 (when the classic forms of lynching had disappeared), 4,743 persons died of lynching, 3,446 of them black men and women. Mississippi (539 black victims, 42 white) led this grim parade of death, followed by Georgia (492 black, 39 white), Texas (352 black, 141 white), Louisiana (335 black, 56 white), and Alabama (299 black, 48 white). From 1882 to 1901, the annual number nationally usually exceeded 100; 1892 had a record 230 deaths (161 black, 69 white). Although lynchings declined somewhat in the 20th century, there were still 97 in 1908 (89 black, 8 white), 83 in the racially-troubled postwar year of 1919 (76 black, 7 white, plus some 25 race riots), 30 in 1926 (23 black, 7 white), and 28 in 1933 (24 black, 4 white)."
(Robert L. Zangrando, "The Reader's Companion to American History," 1991)
As stated above, these statistics do not take into full account the victims in the "race riots" that began in the late 1800s. These massacres of Black people increased at the end of World War I when Black soldiers, who had been relegated to segregated units overseas, returned home expecting to be treated as full citizens. There was also the infamous Tulsa "race riot" in 1921, when white business owners instigated a massacre upon the prosperous Black community.
No white person was ever convicted of killing a Black person during these tragic episodes. This racist atmosphere was aided by the "separate but equal" law passed by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1896 that legalized racist Jim Crow laws in the South and other sections of the United States.
A recurring "excuse" for the lynchings of Black men has been the alleged rape of white women. Under slavery, while both African women and men were "owned" body and soul, the systematic rape of Black women was viewed as the "property right" of the white slavemaster. The recent revelation that the late arch-racist Strom Thurmond "fathered" a daughter during the 1920s with a Black servant reflects the persistence of semi-slavery conditions. Sexual relations between Black men and white women were socially viewed as taboo from the days of slavery until 1967, when miscegenation laws were struck down by the Supreme Court. This important concession won in the civil-rights struggle legalized the right of Black-white heterosexual couples to marry in the South.
Just the rumor that a Black man had raped a white woman would signal that a racist lynching would not be far behind. Fourteen-year-old Emmett Till was tortured to death by racists in 1955 for supposedly whistling at a white woman in Mississippi. The judicial system began instituting legal lynchings. Hundreds of Black men were executed after being charged with raping white women. Who could ever forget the Scottsboro case in the early 1930s, where nine young Black men were accused of gang-raping two white women in Alabama? The case gained worldwide attention as the Communist Party and other progressives came to the defense of these innocent Black youths. Even though the women finally admitted under oath that no rape had occurred, most of the youths were forced to spend many years in prison until public pressure forced the U.S. government to pardon them.
There are currently two important cases that could be considered modern-day Scottsboro cases. The case of Darryl Hunt was publicized in a Jan. 5 column by Bob Herbert, an African-American opinion writer for the New York Times. Herbert described how in 1984, Hunt, then 19 years old, was accused of the rape and murder of Deborah Sykes, a 25-year-old white woman in North Carolina. Forensic DNA testing had just been developed. During the original trial it proved that Hunt was innocent of the charge - but still he languished in jail for almost 20 years. Hunt's lawyers forced a public outcry, and finally exposé articles in the Winston-Salem Journal forced the courts to release Hunt this past December on a $250,000 bond pending a hearing in February. His lawyers are hoping that all murder charges will eventually be dropped by the prosecution. Only time will tell.
The second case has received more national attention. Marcus Dixon, 18, an academically gifted athlete, received a 10-year prison sentence in Rome, Georgia, after being found guilty of statutory rape - a misdemeanor - and aggravated child molestation, a felony. The judge sentenced him to 10 years in prison on the felony charge. Dixon testified that he had had consensual sex with a classmate who was three months shy of her 16th birthday at the time. He stated that she told him her father was a racist and that she feared he would kill the two if he caught them together. (New York Times, Jan. 22)
A jury found Dixon innocent of rape, sexual battery and aggravated assault, all felonies. Five of the jurors publicly stated that they would not have convicted Dixon on the other charges had they known about the prospect of a long prison sentence. Civil-rights forces, along with defense attorneys, have mounted a nationwide campaign of legal and political pressure on the Georgia Supreme Court to overturn this outrageous conviction and sentence.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson has assembled figures to show that the U.S. criminal justice system is still racist to the core:
"According to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund...between 1930 and 1996, more than half of all those executed have been African-Americans. When the crime (or accusation) is rape, the death penalty has almost always been exclusively reserved for blacks. Of the 453 men executed for rape since 1930, 405 have been black. Nearly all of them were executed in the South. They were arrested and convicted on the flimsiest evidence, usually no more than the word of a white woman. At the same time, not one white man received the death penalty for raping a black woman. There is no official record in any Southern state of a black man ever being executed for raping a black woman. The victims of all but 44 of the blacks executed in the South from 1930 through 1984 were white. Not much has changed over the years. A black is still 11 times more likely to get the death penalty than a white when the victim is white. At present nearly half of those currently sitting on the nation's death rows are black."
(Afrocentric News, 2000)
In the latter part of the 19th century, anti-lynching campaigns sprung up throughout the North and South, led for almost 50 years by the National Association of Colored Women and the NAACP. Ida B. Wells, an African-American teacher, journalist and suffragist, was a leading figure in this struggle. To help debunk the racist theory that lynching was justified to "protect the sanctity of white womanhood," the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching encouraged white women to join this anti-racist campaign.
Today, institutionalized lynching persists in the police killings of Black youths, like the recent shooting of unarmed Timothy Stansbury in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant community. The incarceration of Black political prisoners for decades in the prison-industrial complex further illustrates how super-exploitation under capitalism - which keeps so many African-Americans in poverty - continues to be maintained through state terror.
The United States is the most powerful imperialist country largely due to the national oppression of Black people and other peoples of color. African-American activists, in raising the political demand for reparations and targeting U.S. corporations and banks that profited off the sweat and blood of unpaid African slaves, are recognizing this inherited, endemic super-exploitation. The righteous demand for reparations, which deserves the classwide solidarity of all working people, is a small price to pay for all the centuries of immense suffering and degradation that African-Americans have had to endure and fight back against.
(Copyright: Workers World Service. Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this document, but changing it is not allowed. For more information contact Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011; via email: ww@workers.org.)
