As I write this I'm listening to a Rachel Maddow clip discussing the recent murder of a Census worker in Kentucky. The victim had the word FED carved into his chest and was found hanged in a tree. I grew up in the racially segregated south during the civil rights movement.
I remember going to the Maas Brothers soda fountain in Tampa and seeing black patrons turned away, and I remember the white only water fountains and bathrooms common at the time. I remember the stories my Mom told me about blacks having to ride in the back of the bus, (we never took the bus, but my parents wanted me to know how things worked).
And I remember the Martin Luther King marches and the assassinations of the decade of the 60's. I remember the talk of the Ku Klux Klan and the white sheets and the burning crosses and bodies hung in trees that Billie Holiday called strange fruit.
I remember all of that, even though at the time I was so young I barely understood it. But I knew what we called it when you torture someone to death and then hang them in the tree. We had a word for it, everybody knew it. We called it lynching. And what happened to that poor man is no different than what evil and angry men wearing white hoods and sheets did to their own countrymen who happened to be of a different race. It's lynching no matter who does it and no matter who they do it too. And once again, it's alive in the South.
Of all the evils that had to be revisited upon us, why o why did this one have to be among them? Let us not paper this over with euphemistic verbiage so that it loses the very core of it's meaning. What happened to Bill Sparkman could happen to any one of us with whom a certain contingent among Americans disagrees.
I grew up with these people, surrounded by them every day of my life. I still hear from them from time to time, and I see an anger and a hatred in their tone that I've not seen since the 1960's. Let us call this awful act what it really is, a lynching, and let them wear that badge with every bit of despicable meaning that it implies.
This time it's not just a fight between races, it's a fight between all those who believe in civilization and common decency, and the forces of hatred and barbarism. They've made their bed, we need to make them lie in it.
As you write about this, and discuss it with your friends, as a son of the south I ask you all, don't trivialize what this nation went through by calling this merely a hanging. It's a lynching, and that's what we need to call it, no matter how ugly it may seem.