The incident sparked student protests on campus and the NYPD’s hate crime unit launched an investigation with plans to test the rope for DNA. But it’s just one of many recent reports from around the nation of nooses appearing in situations of racial conflict.
What’s happening?
You’ve probably seen the headlines about the “Jena Six,” referring to a group of six black high-schoolers in Jena, La., who were accused of beating a white classmate last year. In fact nooses played a role in this case—the incident came after nooses were hung from a tree on the school premises. The local prosecutor charged the students with attempted murder.
One of the students was tried as an adult and convicted of battery. But last month an appeals court threw out that ruling, saying he should not have been charged as an adult.
Subsequent calls to let the teenager out of jail led to one of the largest civil rights rallies this country has seen in some time, with 10,000 people marching in Jena in late September. But a judge ruled to hold the student in jail while the prosecutor appeals the earlier ruling. And after the rally, nooses surfaced again—this time on the back of a truck driving by groups of demonstrators.
Since then the press has reported other episodes of nooses around the country, left strategically with clear racial intent, from Maryland to New York to Alabama.
The big picture
It’s been 50 years since nine students integrated Central High School in Little Rock, Ark., and over 40 years since the end of Jim Crow laws. Still, the Southern Poverty Law Center, a group that monitors hate crimes and racist organizations, says the use of nooses symbolically has been on the rise for a couple years.
The noose remains a notoriously powerful symbol of violence and repression, stirring up painful memories of black subjugation and disenfranchisement. Its re-emergence, even symbolically, is a frightening reminder that America still has a long way to go in its quest for racial equality and tolerance. Let's hope that these recent incidents of intolerance serve as a wakeup call, because the national conversation on race is far from finished.
