Last month, an African American prosecutor in central Florida received an especially disturbing piece of hate mail: a racist note and a noose.
The prosecutor, State Attorney Aramis Ayala, made national news earlier this year when she announced she would not seek the death penalty in future cases. Her constituents broadly supported the decision, and a grassroots movement sprang up in support. But Florida’s Governor Rick Scott made the reactionary decision to transfer all her death penalty eligible cases to a neighboring prosecutor.
The specter of a white Governor stripping the state’s first black States Attorney of almost two-dozen cases for exercising her lawful discretion was discomfiting enough. But that battle is now buried in a thicket of legal arguments.
Lest the courtroom drama obscure the obvious racial implications of the entire saga, a noose in the mail brings them back into stark relief.
A noose is not just a threat; it’s a symbol of lynchings – which themselves were precursors to the modern death penalty.
Lynchings were used as a tool of racial terror to keep Southern blacks repressed and separate from their white neighbors. Over three quarters of known lynching victims (many lynchings were never recorded) were black – killed by mobs without trial because they were believed to have violated Jim Crow laws or other norms of the racial caste system. Talking back to a white person was reason enough for a group of white people to brutally kill a black man, woman, or child. The largest study on lynchings was conducted by the Equal Justice Initiative and found that over 4,000 black Americans were lynched in the South between 1877 and 1950. According to the NAACP, the few white people lynched were likely lynched for attempting to help black people or for speaking out against lynchings.
As lynchings were slowly outlawed, they were replaced with public executions of black Americans after expedited trials. Where white families once picnicked around the human remains left by a lynch mob, now they shifted plans slightly to spend their Sundays at the gallows.
Without legal lynchings, many believed that the death penalty was necessary to satisfy white mobs’ desire to control and terrorize black people. A recent Florida Politics article recounts how Florida’s Governor in 1959 attempted to convince the legislature to replace the death penalty with life imprisonment. The legislature refused, arguing to do so would cause a resurgence of lynchings. “It was a rare if unwitting acknowledgment of the profound racism that accounts for the South’s peculiar and persistent obsession with the death penalty.”
Indeed, you could easily mistake a map of lynchings with a map of modern-day executions. Florida is not just a state that attacks its own prosecutors for seeking death in prison instead of death by execution. It’s also a state that has never once executed a white person for killing a black person.
Lynchings and the death penalty have provided some of the deadliest examples of racial bias in our justice system, but they are just the tip of the iceberg. Mass incarceration has destroyed low-income communities of color. Policies from stop and frisk to drug arrest rates skew disproportionately against black men and boys. High profile police shootings of unarmed black men have sparked a national conversation about race in our justice system. Consistently harsher sentences for people of color show we are still a nation whose justice system has not recovered from our racist history. We are still the nation that lynched.
We will only move forward as a nation when we confront our ugly history, as well as the racially biased practices and policies that continue to haunt us today.
