The last execution by hanging in Mississippi occurred in 1940. The last alleged lynching by hanging in Mississippi occurred in 2018.
Cindy Hyde-Smith was born in 1959. Public executions aren’t part of the history of Mississippi in her lifetime. Lynchings are.
And of course many of Mississippi’s public executions were themselves legal lynchings.
To speak of “public hangings” in Mississippi is to evoke a long and brutal history of racial terror. To joke about it is to utter an obscenity.
Whatever her intention, Hyde-Smith’s joke amounts to this: “We are not the kind of people who are hanged. We are the kind of people who do the hanging.”
