Noose news

Clarence Page:

Nooses are in the news lately. I'm relieved that no one has been found hanging from any of them.

All that any lamebrain has to do in order to make news, it seems, is to tie a rope into a noose and hang the knotty symbol of segregation-era lynchings in a conspicuous place.

A news database search of "noose" quickly turned up one found recently at a Long Island police station locker room, another in a tree on the University of Maryland campus and another in a black Coast Guard cadet's bag aboard a cutter. A noose found on the office door of a black professor at Columbia University in New York led to a student-led antiracism rally, which national news cameras dutifully covered.

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"This is the first time something like this has happened for our generation," a University of Louisiana senior told the New York Times in Jena. "You always heard about it from history books and relatives. This is a chance to experience it for ourselves."

Sorry, young man, but I knew the '60s. This is not them. Today's America has come a long way since the segregated bad old days. For that we can thank the hard-won victories of the civil rights movement. Racism hasn't disappeared, but it is getting harder to identify, especially when our vision of the future is clouded by old symbols from the past.

Many of us black Americans look through the prism of historical experience and see old-style Southern injustice against blacks, symbolized by the nooses. A series of racially charged incidents in Jena led to charges of attempted murder, that were later reduced, against six black high school students who beat up a white student. Black students reportedly said the white youth had made racial taunts. Many whites hear about the beaten white youth and, regardless of whatever else contributed to local racial tensions, they see an old-style black-on-white hate crime.

But much work has yet to be done that cannot be accomplished with civil rights marches. The return of the noose to public view and national news should remind us, for example, of what a relic the old knotted rope has become.

Today's young black males kill more young black males in a year than the Ku Klux Klan killed in its entire history. (Emphasis added.)

Between 1882 and 1968, historians have documented more than 4,700 lynchings of African Americans, mostly in the South. In 2005, the latest full year of FBI statistics, almost 8,000 black Americans were murdered, mostly by other black Americans.

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That should be a stunning statistic for the race baiter's trying to make a political cause over events in Jena. When I watched Sheila Jackson Lee acting like a demagogue in attacking the black US attorney from Louisiana yesterday it is clear that she was both clueless about the law and the facts, but she was righteous in anger over the wrong thing. It is not surprising. She has always been a light weight when it comes to thinking about an issue, but she is heavy in the arrogance department.

Dana Milbank has the story on the Al Sharpton part of the hearing. You can bet Sharpton was not talking about the real killers of black young men. He also covers Sheila's shouting. It is not pretty.