Langston Hughes wrote this poem for Robert F. Williams as a New Years greeting and published it in The Panther and the Lash (1967). Nina Simone set it to music and recorded it [mp3] on 'Nuff Said (1968).
Though it ruins the poetry, change "Vietnam" to "Iraq," and the line about taxes, and you've got a song for Winston Carter and the United States in 2004.
I try to follow the little bits of discussion on blogs, live journals, and discussion boards about this story. I can't say I'm surprised, but still it's bothers me when I see some people say it couldn't be a lynching, that such things don't really happen anymore.
But what really bothers me is that this is what the Southern Poverty Law Center has to say about it, too. It's what they said to one of my contacts in Montgomery, who called them the first day Winston Carter's death came to light, and it's what Mark Potok, Director of the SPLC Intelligence Project, said to The American Street's Kevin Hayden when he emailed them about the incident.
From: Mark Potok
Sent: Friday, August 27, 2004 8:29 AMKevin,
We don't have any independent information about this death, although if it begins to look particularly suspicious, we will start to gather some.
I would caution you very strongly about leaping to the conclusion that this was a "lynching," or even a murder. In the last three years or so, there have been a very large number of rumors, which have been passed about as fact on a very wide basis, that black men (often after supposedly dating white women) were "lynched," and that their murders were covered up by law enforcement. To date, I know of no case where this has proven to be the truth. Despite the fact that Jesse Jackson has widely publicized one of these cases (Kokomo, Miss.), in each case all the solid evidence has pointed to suicide (in the Kokomo case, the family was convinced to have THREE autopsies, each one of which indicated suicide, Jackson's opinions notwithstanding). I even heard the maker of one of the two recent documentaries about Emmett Till saying on national radio that he knew for a fact that 81 men had been lynched in Mississippi in the last three years, and the cops had covered up each one. Eighty-one! That WOULD be a lot. Again, I know the blog you directed me to claimed to have information about the shoelaces and so on, but this is precisely the kind of information that circulated about some of the other recent cases (in Mississippi and Florida) and in each case I know about, it has proved in the end to be false. I'm not saying that that's the case in Tuskegee, but again, I would warn you against assuming these are murders simply because they occurred in the Deep South. In a large number of the cases that are flatly described by some as proven "lynchings," the local sheriff or police chief has been black -- which immediately casts some doubt on the theory that they're involved in some massive conspiracy to cover up a spate of supposed lynchings.
I don't dismiss any possibility in the Tuskegee case, but I think it's prudent to have a lot more FACTS before going public with allegations of lynchings, murders, or anything of that sort.
I hope this explains our thinking on this. Thanks for writing, and thanks for your interest in these matters. We appreciate them!
To rehash some of what I wrote to Kevin, we wouldn't know that Winston Carter's death had any particularly suspicious appearance if there hadn't been some immediate information gathering by Scott B. I went on to say that Mark Potok is operating on two fallacies. From my email:
The first fallacy involves not allowing for just how profoundly deep seated and how pervasive racist violence was in the "old" south. I think when you read enough about just how bad it was (ever read about a place called Monroe, North Carolina?) and about how total the collusion was among local, state and federal law enforcement (i.e. FBI) . . . it's hard to imagine that all that stuff went away just because some white business owners agreed to let black folks eat lunch and work at their places of business. The second fallacy is that the presence of black person in a position of power, say as Sheriff, like in Tuskegee, "immediately casts some doubt on the theory that they're involved in some massive conspiracy to cover up a spate of supposed lynchings." That's some pretty simple minded analysis if you ask me.
Monroe, North Carolina was where Robert F. Williams had been President of a local NAACP chapter in the 1950s. Read about his struggle there, and you'll see Monroe was a place where non-violent resistance was not an option.
In the aftermath of the 1963 protests in Birmingham, where the Southern Christian Leadership Conference staged one of its most famous victories,
the police department attempted to return to the status quo of race relations. Police chief Jamie Moore responded to the civil disorders by purchasing "100 riot type (military) 12 gauge pump shotguns" . . . During June and July of 1963, officers reexerted their control over the black community. Yet the brutal response to the protest marches compromised the authority of the police. Through force, policemen kept the poor and desperate elements of the community in line. For black people in Birmingham this force often meant "justifiable homicide." On June 28, a policeman killed Blaine Gordon Jr., a seventeen-year-old black male. On July 6, a detective shot, but did not kill, thirty-three-year-old Johnny Patterson, also black. On August 4, an officer killed James Scott Jr., age thirty-five, another black male. The ease with which policemen shot and killed black men reflected a pathology within Birmingham's law enforcement that contributed to future racial crises. (Glenn T. Eskew, But for Birmingham: The Local and National Movements in the Civil Rights Struggle, 313-14)
Without specific intervention to remedy the pathological racism amongst police, how can anyone expect there to have been real change? Just because the manifestation of a pathology changes doesn't mean it's gone away.
I don't know enough about the other cases Potok mentions to argue about them one way or another, but to insinuate, as he does, that eyewitnesses who viewed the terrible spectacle of Winston Carter's death fell prey to some sort of group psychosis is insensitive and condescending. I would like to know when exactly this death will begin to look "particularly suspicious."
In Highways to Nowhere, Wallace Roberts recalls:
Forty years ago, at the first memorial service for the three civil rights workers [Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner], held just a few days after the Gulf of Tonkin incident that marked the beginning of the Vietnam War, Bob Moses, the head of the summer project, said simply, "The same kind of racism that killed these three young men is going to kill thousands of Vietnamese."
Make your substitutions, as above, in "Backlash Blues." Here is, indeed, a strange and bitter crop.
------------
"Backlash Blues" manuscript image from: Congress. Senate Committee on the Judiciary. Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and other Internal Security Laws. Testimony of Robert F. Williams. Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1970. See African American Involvement in the Vietnam War.
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I don’t know if this case was a lynching or a murder, either. But really, the SPLC should be all over the sheriff’s office and all over the case. So what if it turns out to be a suicide, somehow? I don’t know, maybe ALL of the details you have gleaned so far are wrong. Maybe the body was really found in this guy’s bedroom instead of outside in a public place! I don’t know, I can’t figure out how the hell this wouldn’t be suspicious! That doesn’t matter–the mission of the SPLC is to “fight all forms of discrimination.” It certainly sounds like discrimination for the sheriff’s department to dismiss the suspicious death of an African-American man without sufficient investigation. It looks like they aren’t pursuing this case simply because it looked too much like a lynching! What is the matter with this Potok character, “thanks for your interest in these matters!” what a load of crap. It’s time for the SPLC to stop worrying about maybe being embarassed and to send some lawyers, or even some nice legal interns, to Tuskegee to investigate.
Potol said “We don’t have any independent information about this death, although if it begins to look particularly suspicious, we will start to gather some.”
And: “I don’t dismiss any possibility in the Tuskegee case, but I think it’s prudent to have a lot more FACTS before going public with allegations of lynchings, murders, or anything of that sort. I hope this explains our thinking on this.”
His diatribe in the middle strikes me as extremely condescending in its assumption of many things. Perhaps this is borne from their actual experience from others who’ve corresponded, but it plays to a stereotype of folks who report to them, which they’d be wise not to do.
However, from the sections I quoted, I infer that they do have their eye on it and aren’t dismissing my/our concerns. With the tone of the middle, it’d be easy to overlook those points in Potok’s reply.
Any speculation about why it has taken takes Tuskegee’s police department 30 days so far to investigate this without providing answers to the family may be only that. I covered a suicide in a Massachusetts jail where the local police were not forthcoming for several weeks, so I don’t know if there’s an established timeline that police departments try to meet.
I do think they were wrong to publicly label it a suicide before such investigation is completed. Does the investigation continue because therey’ve seen physical reasons that might contradict that first ruling? Do they investigate to be certain they satisfy the disbelieving family that they uncovered every stone? Who knows?
Failing to secure the scene – no matter what they conclude – is a monumental gaffe that may always leave a taint on their results. North, South, East or West, there’s no excuse for trained professionals to demonstrate such incompetence and I certainly hope those who made the mistake are properly disciplined for their failure to maintain standards the public must expect.
For now, I suspect we can only wait. But perhaps it’d be prudent to ask local police chiefs what a reasonable range of time one should expect of such an investigation.
I don’t mean to defend the errors nor grant defense where one’s due, but if we were to assume they DID find something to suggest it’s a homicide/lynching, then wouldn’t it also be a reasonable assumption that they’d be pursuing one or more suspects? If so, revealing details publicly could injure their case and diminish their odds for a successful prosecution.
Potok could use a refresher in public relations, and even the dismay he feels about all the past erroneous publicity does not excuse the defensive and condescending tone of his email to me. But I agree that jumping to conclusions achieves nothing.
Possibly the best response is for everyone watching this to phone the dept at (334)727-0200 and ask that you be emailed a notification when the investigation’s complete. Without being hostile in any way, that would send the clear message that the interest in the case is sufficient to deter any motivation for anything less than than a professional conclusion.
I should think that would increase their motivation to avoid any further errors.
I guess what bothered me about the quoted email (was that the entirety of the email?) was that even without the shoelaces detail, this was a really weird thing. I mean, how often do people succeed in committing suicide by hanging themselves in a public place? The other piece is, a lot of people in the area think it was a lynching. Even if the shoelaces detail is not true, there are people circulating that as a rumor. So if this hanging was not a hate crime of some kind, it’s really important to show that it was not by being super careful about the investigation. Right? Because otherwise, local African-Americans are going to feel very threatened.
This is why I think it’s well within the purview of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Instead of being all, “Thanks for your email dude, now go away” they should be telling you exactly what they are doing in this case. For example, “We are working with the sheriff’s office to make sure that the details of this case are released in a timely way.” That doesn’t put them in opposition to the sheriff–it occurred to me that some of their motivation might have to do with wanting to work well with law enforcement–and it still means that they are on this.
What I mean is, their (the SPLC and the sheriff’s office) attitude should be, “Anything that has the appearance of a hate crime should be treated carefully” and not “You think this is a hate crime because you are stupid and/or paranoid.”
Kevin, I think you are being quite reasonable, but I have to disagree with what you’re saying. First point of disagreement is in the post you’re commenting on: when does this start to look suspicious enough to warrant action from the SPLC? If part of what looks suspicious is the poor quality of the police investigation, then what good does it do to wait and see what the police turn up first?
But I have a more serious thing to disagree about, too. It’s fine to say that the police may have their reasons for not going public with all their information. BUT, we are talking about an incident where a black man was found hanging from a tree in a public place. That is ENORMOUSLY symbolic and can only be experienced as an act of TERRORISM by the African American communities in the area.
We are talking about something that reads as racial terrorism in an area that has a pitiful legacy of incident upon incident of racist violence going uninvestigated— bombings, shootings, cars getting run off the road, beatings, you name it. It is well documented that in the past such things went on with full knowledge of the police and that, in fact, the police were often the perpetrators themselves. Very few of the countless incidents were ever investigated. The police on the force now are the children and grandchildren of the Police/KKK coalition that used terror tactics to keep the “peace” by subduing and intimidating black folks. The past is still very near.
Right now, the Tuskegee Police has a professional and a historical responsibility to quell the legitimate fears of the community that they are supposed to serve. This means conducting the investigation seriously and carefully and as publicly as circumstances allow—even if this only means regular announcements that they are working hard at the investigation and will reveal the developments as soon as possible. If the police has good reason to think that this is a suicide then they must give some indication as to why.
If the police cannot vigorously maintain the sort of conduct I just outlined, they collude either in effect or by intent with terrorist murderers and send the message to all African Americans in the area that in Alabama lynchings are still a-okay.
Af far as the SPLC goes, if they are worth anything as an organization, they should be keenly aware of the symbolic force of Winston Carter’s death and be doing EVERYTHING possible to bring pressure on the police to start acting appropriately.