I have given only passing attention to the current spate of “Jena sparks noose madness” stories. The more noose stories we see; the more nooses appear. You don’t put out a fire by pumping in more oxygen.
But this noose article in the New Orleans Times-Picaynue moves beyond a knee-jerk, “Look at all them crazy people hanging them nooses!” theme. Lance Hill, director of Tulane University’s Southern Institute for Education and Research, cuts to the heart of the problem:
It’s troublesome that we don’t dig as a nation, we don’t dig much deeper than just the symbolic images and that it just leaves us unprepared for injustices that can be happening right under our nose. We don’t recognize that injustice because it doesn’t have a noose around its neck.
The symbol of a noose hanging from a tree in a segregated school yard is powerful . . . maybe too powerful.
As I have stated ad nauseam, Jena isn’t about a hate crime; it’s about public officials turning a teaching opportunity into a tacit endosrsement of de facto segregation. This is a story bristling with weapons: a noose, a pen, a fist and a tennis shoe. Of the lot, the pen is by far the most dangerous.
The noose hanging phase will only proliferate so long as we respond with wailing, lamentation and calls for aggressive prosecution. No one would ever have heard about Jena, Louisiana if Reed Walters had confronted high school students with a noose instead of a pen. “Look at this thing,” Walters should have said. “It’s a symbol of hatred and mob justice. It’s a sign of craven cowardice. It tells me that some students at this school don’t believe in the basic American values of equality and free association. Well, I’m here to tell you that this ugly rope, and the hatred it symbolizes, will not be tolerated in LaSalle Parish or at this school. Have I made myself understood?”
That speech would have drained all the demonic power out of the noose symbol, and it would have settled the beef between black and white students.
But Reed Walters didn’t deliver that speech, and Justin Barker paid the price. The Department of Justice still insists that there is no connection between the noose incident and the racial charged altercations three months later. The connection is Reed Walters’ pen. With one click of his ball-point, a stupid prank became an act of official oppression.
The recent rash of noose hangings teach us that there are a lot of hateful, cowardly white folks afoot in the land–a fact worth noting. But noose hangers are not representative Americans, and they don’t make public policy. It’s our collective response to the noose hangers that shows who we are.
Pay particular attention to the hate crime in Jefferson Parish mentioned midway through the Times-Picayune article. A disgusting and blatantly racist display was tolerated for half a decade–then Jena placed a thumb on the balance of justice. Still, public officials stop short of calling hate by its proper name. What does this tell us about Jefferson Parish?
The key distinction is between hate crimes met with unequivocal denunciation and hate crimes receiving the tacit endorsement of public officials. We saw the latter in LaSalle Parish; and it appears to be what we are seeing it down the road in Jefferson Parish.
Nooses resurface in wake of Jena 6
Posted by Meghan Gordon, West Bank bureau November 25, 2007 6:38PM
At its most literal, a noose is a loop with a slipknot that binds closer the more it is drawn.
When displayed in public, however, it becomes in many eyes an image pregnant with the symbolism of lynching, one of the most overt displays of terrorism and racial hatred of the past century.
In the two months since activists converged on Jena to create the largest civil rights protest in years, reports of hangman’s nooses have proliferated across the country, including three times in government workplaces in New Orleans suburbs and once in the personal vehicle of a Thibodaux police officer.
Though scholars who study civil rights and hate crimes share concern over the troubling trend, their theories diverge on whether the rash of reports indicates a true resurgence of the symbol or a side effect of the considerable attention paid to the Jena rally.
“The situation in Jena has unleashed a white backlash,” said Heidi Beirich, deputy director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project, which tracks extremist groups and monitors the rising number of hate crimes reported to local police. It “revitalized this symbol of racial oppression that we haven’t really seen lately.”
Meanwhile, Lance Hill, director of Tulane University’s Southern Institute for Education and Research, compared the surge in noose reports to the phenomenon of learning a new word and then hearing it in nearly every conversation.
“The frequency of the word in the English language was probably the same,” he said. “It wasn’t until you looked it up and began to understand its meaning that it started to stand out.”
Rash of recent sightings
Stories of nooses hanging in offices, schools and public spaces have peppered local newspapers across the country, and not just in Southern states.
A mixed-race student found the image of a noose and a racial epithet painted on his car Oct. 19 after attending a high school football game in DeKalb County, Ala.
A Haitian chaplain found a noose hanging from the door of his office in a Rockland, N.Y., children’s psychiatric center Nov. 4.
A toilet-paper noose was discovered hanging from a campus bathroom stall Nov. 8 at North Carolina State University.
Construction workers in Cicero, Ill., found a noose hanging from a beam where they were working on a municipal building Nov. 12.
An African-American police sergeant in Bridgeport, Conn., found a noose under her patrol car Nov. 14.
In Louisiana, teachers at an elementary school run by Grambling State University put a noose around a child’s neck in late September during a lesson on the civil rights movement and the Jena Six rally.
The Thibodaux Police Department fired officer Michael Rodrigue on Oct. 29 after another white officer reported seeing a noose hanging from the rear-view mirror in his personal car parked on public property.
Donald Rodrigue, his father, told the Houma Courier newspaper that another officer had given his son the item that he had displayed in his car for four or five years as a symbol of law and order.
Chad Mire, vice president of the Thibodaux City Council, said chatter about the case has largely died down in the Lafourche Parish community. When the incident became public, however, he said he heard residents who approached it from different angles.
“I had people tell me they thought it was wrong and he shouldn’t have had it there,” he said. “Other people told me although he shouldn’t have had it, they were violating his civil rights by firing him (and that) for five years nobody’s ever made an issue of it.”
Jefferson Parish incident
On Nov. 7, Terrence Lee, a Jefferson Parish sewerage worker, revealed photos of a noose, a bullwhip, a “BILL’S WHIPPING POST” sign and a dartboard that he described having a photo of an African-American at the center — all hanging in an area directly outside his supervisors’ office, a space he had to enter every day to retrieve keys to parish trucks.
The parish condemned the items as violations of parish policy prohibiting offensive and harassing materials. But under the threat of a civil lawsuit by the employee, Parish President Aaron Broussard spoke carefully about his administration’s findings. He called it a “knotted rope,” avoiding the term “noose,” and otherwise steered clear of passing judgment about the items’ racial references.
Scott McQuaig, a lawyer hired by three employees named by Lee as having a part in what he called a racially charged work environment, said they all denied owning the items or placing them in the office. At the same time, McQuaig said they treated them as practical jokes that had nothing to do with race.
Lee’s attorney, Danatus King, chastised the government for the tip-toeing around the racial implications.
“The rope is not just a rope. It’s clearly a noose,” he said. “The spin that they’re trying to put on it to diminish the severity, the terrorism, that those objects perpetuated is discouraging.”
The parish is expected to conclude disciplinary hearings for seven employees today.
Two weeks ago, a white Slidell city employee tied electrical wire in the shape of a noose around a paper figure after he had an altercation with his African-American supervisor. Mayor Ben Morris fired the grounds maintenance worker when he failed to appear at a disciplinary hearing.
And last week, a Kenner employee found a noose hanging from the tractor he uses to cut grass.
Hate crimes on the rise
Beirich said the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project gathered reports of 50 to 60 nooses found in public spaces since the Jena protest, a staggering increase from the eight to 10 reported in what she considers an active year.
“It’s just a terrible thing,” she said of the noose image. “Lynching is a stain on this country’s history, and it was the ultimate symbol of what was wrong with our race relations.”
Reports of hate crimes in general have also risen, according to statistics released by the FBI last week.
In 2006, police recorded 7,722 crimes in which the victims or property were targeted because of race, religion, sexual orientation, ethnicity, nationality or physical or mental disability. The figure represents a 7.8 percent rise from the 7,163 hate crimes reported in 2005.
Louisiana police departments, meanwhile, reported a 35 percent increase from 2005 to 2006. The local jurisdictions reported a total of 27 hate crimes last year, including 12 aggravated assaults, seven simple assaults and one intimidation, according to the FBI.
The Jena rally threw the spotlight on the statistics and inspired similar activism elsewhere.
The protest had its roots in racial tension at Jena High School that erupted more than a year ago.
A flashpoint came when three white students hung a noose from a oak tree after a black teenager asked to sit under it. Six black students then beat a white classmate Dec. 4, 2006. Prosecutors charged five as adults under the attempted second-degree murder statute. Activists objected to the severity of the charges.
On the heels of a Sept. 20 rally to draw attention to case, the Rev. Al Sharpton; Martin Luther King III, a son of the slain civil rights icon; and Charles Steele Jr., president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, led a protest outside the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 16 to decry what they described as lax enforcement of federal hate crimes laws.
In the crowds that poured into both rallies were thousands of college students such as Khalilah Reed, a Grambling State University senior and president of the school’s NAACP chapter.
Reed said the Jena Six case had at least one positive byproduct: It gave her group a concrete example of why it exists. She and friends returned to campus with a renewed interest in talking to other students about fighting racism.
On the flip side, Reed said, she thinks the protests only show some people that they will attract attention if they hang nooses and other hate symbols.
“It seems like every time I turn around now I hear something about nooses,” she said. “They’re using the Jena Six march as a catalyst for racism.”
Subtler forms of racism
Hill believes the focus on nooses has a far more damaging side effect: It diverts attention from the more subtle and widespread racism that pervades life for some minority groups.
He gave the example of the decision to leave Charity Hospital closed, which he said continues to inflict pain and even death on poor, uninsured black New Orleanians.
“Few people would equate that with the virulent racism of a lynch mob,” he said. “But in terms of how policies affect people, I don’t think a person dying a slow death of diabetes because they didn’t receive treatment feels any better.”
Hill said the most prevalent form of racism in the United States remains the indifference to the suffering of other people. The frenzy over noose sightings, meanwhile, shows that people keep looking for racism as it manifested itself 40 years ago, in the same way he said a general might be more prepared to fight the previous war than the current one.
“It’s troublesome that we don’t dig as a nation, we don’t dig much deeper than just the symbolic images and that it just leaves us unprepared for injustices that can be happening right under our nose,” Hill said. “We don’t recognize that injustice because it doesn’t have a noose around its neck.”
Meghan Gordon can be reached at mgordon@timespicayune.com or (504) 826-3785.
Friends of Justice 
To date, the only copycat noose-hanging incident that appears to be an authentic case of anti-black racism is the nooses two Louisiana teenagers dangled from the tailgate of a pickup truck at they drove past Jena Six protestors. Several people have come forward to “confess” they hung nooses as part of Halloween displays or pranks. The Army ended its full-scale investigation into a “noose” found hanging at the entrance to Anniston Army Depot in Alabama by concluding the noose was a tie-down that fallen off a delivery truck. A “noose” discovered in the doctor’s lounge in a large Louisiana medical center turned out to be a device used in physical therapy. A noose found at Rancho Bernardo High School in San Diego turned out to be a prop for a student stage play.
In one of the most publicized noose incidents, a black firefighter/paramedic has admitted leaving a knotted rope and a threatening note with a drawing of a noose in an East Baltimore firehouse. According to the Baltimore Sun (Dec. 2), “The news of the hoax came a day after a report released by the city’s inspector general found that the top performers on two recent Fire Department promotions exams likely cheated amid lapses in testing security. A black firefighters group had called accusations of cheating racially motivated after union officials questioned the test scores. But the investigation found that five African-American firefighters had studied by using a 2001 exam, which is against test protocol. A black firefighters group had called accusations of cheating racially motivated after union officials questioned the test scores. But the investigation found that five African-American firefighters had studied by using a 2001 exam, which is against test protocol.”
Despite pressure from the House Judiciary Committee, the Justice Department is unlikely to file charges against the three white students who came forward and amitted hanging the nooses at Jena High School. According to the Justice Department, a successful prosecution would not result in a criminal conviction but a “finding of deliquencey,” the juvenile equivalent of a misdemeanor. The three students say the hung the nooses to poke fun at friends who were on the school rodeo team, a idea they say they got from the lynching scene in the movie, “Lonesome Dove.” They claim they were unaware nooses could be construed as racist symbols. Since federal investigators and local authorities are on the record saying they believe the three students’ explanation, it is unlikely that the Justic Department could successfully prosecute them.
Following the Jena Six beating incident, the Justice Department reopened its investigation into the noose-hanging incident and determined there was no link between it and the Jena Six attack on a white student six months later. U.S. Attorney Donald Washington told CNN that, “A lot of things happened between the noose hanging and the fight occurring, and we have arrived at the conclusion that the fight itself had no connection.” He added that none of the black students involved in the beating made “any mention of nooses, of trees, of the ‘N’ word or any other word of racial hate.”