Thread by @sethkotch

Welp, a politician said something awful about public hanging, and this is my lane so ... thread? (racist violence ahead)

nbcnews.com/politics/polit…

Well into the 20th century, in Mississippi and the South, pubic hanging was how counties executed people. Hangings were often well-attended and festive events--you could expect to get nice and drunk and do some visiting. They were attended by white and Black people. (!)

Some people were bothered by it, but it was normal to watch someone die in public. Mary Gash wrote a friend about how she timed one hanging victim's death by watching his pulse in his wrist. She was that close. This was in 1832--also the earliest use of "puking" in my research.

Execution's companion in the South was lynching. We know from the @eji_org that historically, *at least* 5,000 African Americans were lynched. Occasionally, a white person was lynched or a Black person by a Black mob--exceptions that prove the rule of anti-Black terrorism.

At least 7 people that we know of were lynched in Brookhaven, and Lincoln County, where Hyde-Smith's from. Since there are few documented lynchings before 20th C in Lincoln, there were *certainly* more in 1860s and 1870s, at least. Lincoln County is named for Abraham Lincoln.

One man was lynched in 1894, another in 1895. Powerfully, the Chicago Defender published its annual list of legal hangings and lynchings together. You can see Thomas Bowen's name--lynched in "Brook Haven" in June. That year: 89 executed, 171 lynched.

bit.ly/2z4xAxl

In 1908, a man named Eli Piggot (spellings vary) was murdered by Whitecaps, or kind of an alt-KKK. One paper said it was just sad that he was killed after his arrest, rather than before. He was hanged not far from the courthouse in Brookhaven.

In 1928, Stanley and James Bearden, brothers and both fathers, got in a dispute with some white store-owners, were jailed, and then abducted and lynched. One person remembered her dad as the "only decent man in Brookhaven" who tried and failed to get the sheriff to do something.

And in 1955 activist and veteran Lamar Smith was murdered on the courthouse lawn in front of dozens of witnesses, including a sheriff, who told the DA he saw the murderer leaving the scene covered in blood. He did nothing.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamar_Smi…

Mississippi was one of the last states in the county to stop public hangings (and switch to the electric chair). But even after the switch to the chair, executions remained local--the chair was transported from county to county.

The executioner was a study in symbolism: a tattooed white ex-con who did time in Parchman for armed robbery before gaining celebrity for his new gig. In 1951, he killed Willie McGee. The execution was broadcast on local radio.

npr.org/templates/stor…

"Public hanging" in Mississippi and elsewhere in the South took place at the pleasure of and for the pleasure of white observers. When Black people took a role--turning them into true civic events, with prayer--white pols shut them down. This happened in NC in 1909.

"Public hanging" in Mississippi and elsewhere in the South was a clear-cut, widely understood celebration of lethal whiteness. Hanging (and lynching) was as public as it could be for as long as was tolerable. To witness, in the front row or the back, was to participate.

When other more subtle forms of racist violence became well-entrenched, the death penalty and lynchings faded from wide public view ( & then came roaring back in the 1970s, post-Civil Rights Movement).

A call back to public hanging is a call back to unchecked racist violence.

The cruel luxury of whiteness is forgetting.

One study showed that even when Black parents protected their children from a lynching by not talking about it, the kids inherited the lynching’s trauma.

White people forgot all about it.