June 22, 2005

Oregon’s dark hour

By Chris Honore
For the Tidings

In 1906, in Coos Bay, Ore., a black man, Alonzo Tucker, was jailed, accused of raping a white woman. Though the accounts of how Tucker escaped jail and hid under a dock throughout the night are unclear, what is known is that a mob of 200-300 armed men were intent on taking justice into their own hands. Whether they marched on the jail and the sheriff released Tucker rather than let him fall into the hands of the mob or he slipped away as he was being transferred from one jail to another, what is of record is that he was caught by the mob the next day and shot twice. He had a noose around his neck. He was then hanged from the Fourth Street Bridge. No indictments were brought against any member of the mob and a coroner's report said, simply, that the victim died of asphyxiation. The local paper, at the time, is reported to have observed that the crowd was “quiet and orderly” and that there was no “unnecessary disturbance of the peace.”

This was the only recorded lynching in the state of Oregon.

However, with the exception of four New England states, in towns and cities across America, between 1882 and 1968, 4,743 lives were claimed by lynching (historians estimate that there were many more, unreported). While immigrants were often targets, the practice was predominant in the South where, according to research compiled by Tuskegee University, four out of five victims were black. All manner of crimes were alleged as a justification, from assault to simply speaking to a white person in a certain manner. Since habeas corpus — or any form of due process — was never a consideration, the validity of the charges was immaterial.

Lynching was about something else.

There is an important distinction to be made when discussing lynching as opposed to hanging. Lynching, such as that perpetrated against Alonzo Tucker, is defined as being perpetrated by a mob. It is terrorism and intimidation of the most brutal kind. The objective was not just to kill but to maim, to dismember, to degrade and dehumanize.

An example that still defies understanding, the sheer brutality so extensive as to be unimaginable, was the lynching of Claude Neal, in Marianna, Fla., in 1934. He was accused of murdering a white woman and was tortured over a long period of time, hanging by a rope from a tree but not allowed to strangle. He was dismembered, slashed, tortured and maimed. Fingers and toes were cut off (later sold). All before he was finally killed. Photographs of the lynching and torture were taken and turned into postcards and sold. There was a crowd of more than 7,000 on hand to bear witness due to the fact that the lynching was published ahead of time in the local papers. Though state and federal officials were made aware of what was to take place, no one took any action to prevent it.

A lynching was often a carnival-like event, the atmosphere almost celebratory. To look at the photographs taken at the time is to see men, women and children gathered as if at a church social. Many are smiling, laughing, their excitement all but palatable; refreshments were sold. Trains were scheduled to coincide with a lynching. Schools and businesses closed. Newspapers ran ads announcing locations and times. Photos, parts of the ropes, even the victims' ears and fingers and toes were sold as souvenirs. Bodies, hanging lifeless, were often left in place for days.

Lynching was not about simple retribution. It was about something else. But whatever the motivation, however convoluted the rationale, it revealed a side of the human spirit so dark, so malevolent that to this day it escapes comprehension. Did this really happen in America? Mark D. Planning, counsel for the Committee for a Formal Apology, called it an “American Holocaust.”

And how, we ask ourselves, could the state and federal governments have allowed such a barbaric and inhuman practice to ever take place without strict laws being passed that would have mandated the prosecution of anyone who participated in such acts?

The reality is that though efforts were made to pass federal laws making lynching a crime, no such laws were ever passed, though many, on a national level, spoke out against it. Seven presidents, starting with Benjamin Harrison in 1891, advocated making it a federal crime. The year before Claude Neal was lynched, Franklin Delano Roosevelt pleaded that an anti-lynching law be passed. But the senate was then in the grip of southern lawmakers who successfully filibustered against it, insisting that it intruded on states' rights. Nothing was ever done.

Finally, last week, the Senate of the United States, offered a formal apology for its inaction over the last 100 years and more. It was the first time that members of Congress have apologized to African-Americans for any reason. “The Senate failed you and your ancestors and our nation,” said Sen. Mary L. Landrieu of Louisiana, chief Democratic sponsor of the resolution, speaking to a group of descendants of victims who had been lynched. Families that still carry the memories and bear the scars that for some will never be healed.