Outlawing Lynching, At Long last

A BILL HAS BEEN INTRODUCED in congress which would make lynching a federal crime. Several aspects of this stir amazement. First, it is amazing that lynching isn't already a federal crime, isn't, in essence, against the law in the federal code. Since murder is illegal in federal law, it can be extrapolated by extension that lynching is also a criminal offense, arguably, and yet, that lunching per se has not been placed specifically within the jurisdiction of the federal government seems, at the least surprising, at the most, unconscionable. Equally amazing is that bills to federally criminalize lynching have been introduced into the national legislative assembly, both the House and the Senate, no less than two hundred different times over the past several decades, without passing. Lynching, as we all know, is nothing other than a term for hanging by the neck until dead, what was once colloquially called a "necktie party", an ancient and reliable form of capital punishment which has effectively ended the lives of millions of human beings throughout history. The term "lynching", however, has a uniquely American denotation; it refers particularly to the hanging of African-Americans, outside the legal system, by vigilantes, whose only motive was racial hatred of African-Americans. At the risk of bring indelicate, people who have carried out lynchings never used the term "African-American". The most commonly used terms were "nigger", "coon", darkie", and so forth, terms with which we are all too familiar as relics of an unfortunate national history. The practice started after the Civil War, after the emancipation of American slaves in 1865, and was practiced most frequently beginning with the end of Reconstruction in 1877, when the American army ended its brutal occupation of the former confederacy, and enforced racial equality. Lynchings were most common between 1877 and World War Two, although incidents of lynching occurred with some frequency well into the nineteen sixties. With he advent of the civil rights movement, their frequency declined considerably, but has never entirely ceased. Probably three to four thousand African-Americans have been lynched in American history, but that is doubtless a very conservative estimate, and includes only well document4ed cases, and omit probably many times more undocumented instances of murders carried in the deep of night, by secretive gangs of racist whites, whose behavior was deliberately concealed and never reported by law enforcement agencies, mostly in the south. Is our national reluctance to enshrine the criminality of lynchings into federal law yet another example of hidden institutional racism in America? You can be sure that it is, if ever you happen to hear some politician or pundit mention "states rights' as a reason for federal reticence. "States rights" was long substituted for the word "slavery" in explaining the causes of the Civil War. One fact is indisputable. The continued absence of federal anti lynching laws can be directly traced to American conservatism, not progressivism, because racism is a traditional, conservative value, not a progressive one. The legislative record doubtless will demonstrate that those members of congress who opposed previous anti lynching legislation were noted conservatives. It will be interesting to see if the current bill in congress gains enough support to pass, and if it doesn't, which members of which party oppose it. We shall soon see.