Editor’s note: This commentary is by Judith Levine, a writer and activist from Hardwick.
[O]n Aug. 28, a child was lynched in Claremont, New Hampshire.
Let me repeat that. A child was lynched in Claremont, New Hampshire.
The boy is 8. He is biracial. His assailants were four white teenagers.
No adults witnessed the event but the kids at the scene and the child’s mother, who was nearby, described it this way:
The victim and his 11-year-old sister were playing in the yard. The teens were there too, playfully looping the rope of a rope swing around their necks. The child did the same — it’s unclear if they encouraged him or if he did it voluntarily. But once the noose was around his neck, one of the teenagers pushed him off the table he was standing on, and the foursome walked away.
This was after they allegedly had been calling him the N-word and throwing rocks and sticks at him.
The boy’s 11-year-old sister screamed for help as her brother kicked his feet and grabbed at his neck. He swung three times, turning purple, before he freed himself and dropped to the ground.
This attack contains the elements of a lynching: black victim, white assailants, racial epithets, noose. That the victim did not die does not disqualify it as a lynching. In fact, during Reconstruction and decades into the 20th century, white supremacists used the threat of lynching to terrorize black people who might have been under the impression that the 13th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution had freed them from slavery.
In the long and revolting annals of this terrorist act — not just hanging but also shooting, burning at the stake, dismemberment, castration and other tortures — New Hampshire has distinguished itself as one of five states, including Vermont, that recorded no lynching casualties.
There was no casualty here either, so strictly speaking, New Hampshire’s record stands.
But barely. A child was lynched. He just didn’t die.
The family posted photos online of their boy’s pudgy little neck, scarred where the rope cut into his soft skin. The posts spread through social media and smaller anti-racist and progressive blogs.
The first mainstream newspaper story did not appear until Sept. 5, in the Valley News, eight days after the incident.
On Sept. 13 about 100 people gathered in Claremont’s town square, joined hands and sang “We Shall Overcome.” Only a day or two earlier had the major national media begun to pick up the story.
But the mainstream press has not used the word.
CBS Local News did not use the word lynch.
The Boston Globe has not used the word lynch. Its headline began “After alleged taunting and hanging …”
VPR News declined to use the word lynching. It called the hanging “a possibly racially motivated incident.”
The New York Times referred to the child’s “wounding.”
WBUR-Boston got closer, calling it a “lynching-style attack.”
Newsweek printed the word, but only in the mouth of a 22-year-old activist from Vermont named Olivia Lapierre. “How can people of color feel safe living here if law enforcement is not acknowledging the lynching of an 8 year old as a hate crime?” Lapierre asked rhetorically.
Only African-American publications called the attack what it was. For instance, Essence reported: “White Teens Attempt to Lynch an 8-year-old Boy.”
The police are just starting to look into the case as a hate crime. On Sept. 12, New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu released a statement: “Hatred and bigotry will not be tolerated in New Hampshire,” it said.
But hatred and bigotry are tolerated in New Hampshire. Donald Trump swept the New Hampshire Republican primary. More than 47 percent of New Hampshire voters chose Trump in the presidential election, just a squeak behind Hillary Clinton. Trump launched his campaign by calling Mexicans rapists. He launched his presidency by banning Muslims from entering the U.S. Most recently he reiterated his concern for people of color by complimenting Nazis and white supremacists as “fine people.”
“I almost lost my grandson,” the child’s grandmother, Lorrie Slattery, told CBS. “How he survived that, without any internal injuries, is amazing to me. I think he had a guardian angel out there.”
He survived, but surely not without internal injuries.
America is suffering grave internal injuries. These injuries are the result of the pathology it acquired — no, inflicted upon itself — at birth: racism. Under the current president, the nation is undergoing a flagrant, violent outbreak of that disease.
Lynching is a recurrent symptom of the disease of American racism. In fact, just two years ago — on Aug. 28, as it happens — the 17-year-old African-American high-school football player Lennon Lacy was found dead, hanging from a swing set in the middle of an all-white North Carolina trailer park. The police ruled it a suicide and the FBI found no evidence of homicide, conclusions the NAACP disputes. Lacy had been dating a white woman. Interracial sex, real or imagined, is a time-honored rationale for lynching.
This time an 8-year-old boy was lynched, for no apparent reason except that he was brown.
The first step to diagnosing a disease is to identify its symptoms. The first step to healing a disease is to name it.
