Soniakapadia
In 2018, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama became the country's first memorial dedicated to the legacy of people terrorized by lynching.
Donald Trump’s recent tweet describing the impeachment inquiry as “a lynching” drew a howl of criticism, with both sides of the political aisle weighing in. Congressman Bobby Rush, an Illinois Democrat, offered the President a history lesson.
“Do you know how many people who look like me have been lynched, since the inception of this country, by people who look like you,” Rush inquired via tweet.
His Republican colleague, Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, took a slightly different tack, explaining: “We can all disagree on the process, and argue merits. But never should we use terms like ‘lynching’ here. The painful scourge in our history has no comparison to politics, and @realDonaldTrump should retract this immediately.”
The use of the term “political lynching” surfaced long before the civil rights movement that called attention to lynching. New York Governor William Sulzer, for example, was impeached and removed from office in 1913 as a result of a politically fueled inquiry. In a statement issued afterward, Sulzer decried the proceedings that stripped him of office as a “farce, a political lynching . . . a human shambles, a libel on law, a flagrant abuse of Constitutional rights” and “a disgrace to our civilization.”
Arguably, the term also applied to the removal of President Dwight David Eisenhower’s chief of staff, Sherman Adams, in September 1959. He resigned amid an investigation over allegations of accepting a gift.
“An innocent man went to the gallows of American politics Monday night,” columnist David Lawrence later wrote of the affair in the New York Herald Tribune, “not by a ‘jury of his peers,’ but by the political hangmen of the hour.” The “political lynching of Adams,” Lawrence concluded, “was no less an injustice because it was carried out under the ‘code’ which demands that, in order to win elections, suspicion must be accepted as proof.”
Both William Sulzer and Sherman Adams have long been forgotten, but the device of likening some sort of gross political injustice to a lynching has remained. It has, however, been far less common in recent years as public awareness over the ugly racialized history of lynching became more widespread.
In 1956, Mitford Mathews, editor of A Dictionary of Americanisms on Historical Principles, defined lynch law narrowly as “the practice or custom by which persons are punished for real or alleged crimes without due process of law.” The denial of due process of law remained one of the cornerstone aspects of lynching. By denying the accused their day in court and consigning them to the summary judgment of the mob, those in power helped to perpetuate the crime by failing to provide the most token defense of the victim.
But this limited and inadequate definition of lynching obliterates a bloody history of racial violence that continues to impact how the word is understood today. In the decades after the Civil War, one type of lynching—the racial spectacle lynching—reached epidemic proportions.
Between 1882-1968, an estimated 3,446 people of African descent were lynched in the United States, approximately 73 percent of the total 4,743 documented lynchings. During this time, the term lynching itself became almost synonymous with extra-legal violence against people of African descent. To justify the killing, white apologists for the violence used the pretext of Black crime as the root and cause of lynching.
African American civil rights activists like Mary Church Terrell sought to dispel such myths by pointing to what she saw as the root causes of these racially motivated killings: racial hatred, and a spirit of lawlessness in the South. The lynch mob, she observed, derived its sense of purpose from white America’s irrational fear of black people and hatred towards them.
This limited and inadequate definition of lynching obliterates a bloody history of racial violence that continues to impact how the word is understood today.
The failure of responsible parties to prevent such travesties facilitated mob violence. Around the same time, Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute established four criteria for documenting lynchings. Those criteria were: 1. There must be legal evidence that a person was killed, 2. The person must have met death illegally, 3. A group must have participated in the killing and, 4. The group must have acted under the pretext of service to justice, race, or tradition.
Clarence Thomas invoked this more familiar definition of lynching during the Congressional hearings occasioned by his nomination to the United States Supreme Court in October of 1991. Lashing out at his interrogators Thomas proclaimed that from his “standpoint as a black American” the proceedings amounted to “a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks.”
Thomas’ statement carried the full historical weight of the word, especially in light of the racialized crime of lynching. When he declared, “you will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured,” it was a compelling, if self-serving reminder of that history.
If Trump invoked the specter of lynching to highlight a denial of due process in his case, then it would have made some degree of sense. Up until this point, the President has been afforded every accoutrement of due process in relation to the impeachment inquiry—thus his lynching analogy holds no weight.
More importantly, given the history of race relations in this country and the President’s own problematic habit of weaponizing racism to promote his agenda, his tweet was at best insensitive and at worse horribly offensive to the memory of the nearly 3,500 Americans of African descent who suffered barbarous torture and death at the hands of lynch mobs in the United States. In this instance as in many others, the President’s own insubstantial, limited and almost cartoonish understanding of history was fully displayed.
Trump’s habit of stirring up animosity toward people of color and other political enemies through his own irresponsible rhetoric is more reminiscent of lynching times. Lynch mobs were often whipped into a frenzy by the irresponsible words and actions of business leaders, politicians and in some cases even clergy. Their hate-filled diatribes rationalized all manner of violence against those they deemed fit for the noose.
One cannot decouple the word “lynching” from its history. Therefore, its use will remain problematic. It cannot and should never be rehabilitated given the record of racial violence it invokes, but also because of the insidious way it undermined one of the fundamental principles of American democracy: the right to a fair trial.
I do not expect Donald Trump to know this history. I do, however, expect that the President of the United States, or at least his advisors, to possess the sensibility to know how careless words and actions can inflict unnecessary hurt and trauma. They should not allow such discourse, nor should they to detract from the primary focus—a wholly justified investigation into the manner in which the nation is conducting its foreign policy.
To make amends, perhaps the President could follow the advice of Congressman Rush in a subsequent tweet: “If the President wishes to learn about actual lynching, I would encourage him to read, support, & pass my bill, the Emmett Till Anti-lynching Act, which makes lynching a federal hate crime.”
That would be a lesson in history from which we all could benefit.