On November 2nd, 2018, in what she later described as an “exaggerated expression of regard” for a friend, Republican Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith said, “If he invited me to a public hanging, I’d be in the front row.” Some commentators have suggested that the line was a coded message or a dogwhistle aimed at the more racist members of her voting constituency, but, as a white Mississippian who has had a lifetime of experience with this sort of thing, I don’t think that’s it at all. Cindy Hyde-Smith wasn’t secretly thinking about the lynching of L.Q. Ivy that took place a few miles away from where she stood as she made her cold and callous “joke” because Cindy Hyde-Smith has almost certainly never even heard of L.Q. Ivy or read an account of the horror that he faced.
A reporter from the Memphis News-Scimitar was there that September Sunday in 1925, and he described what he saw, “I watched a Negro burned at the stake at Rocky Ford, Miss., Sunday afternoon. I watched an angry mob chain him to an iron stake. I watched them pile wood around his helpless body. I watched them pour gasoline on this wood. And I watched three men set this wood on fire. I stood in a crowd of 600 people as the flames gradually crept nearer and nearer to the helpless Negro. I watched the blaze climb higher and higher encircling him without mercy. I heard his cry of agony as the flames reached him and set his clothing on fire.”
Afterward, William N. Bradshaw, a member of the mob, was quoted by the Memphis reporter as saying, “Not an officer in Union County or any of the neighboring counties will point out any member of the crowd. Sure the officers know who were there. Everybody down there knows everything else. We’re all neighbors and neighbors’ neighbors.”
Cindy Hyde-Smith’s words and her response to the outcry have revealed that the same attitude is still prevalent in Mississippi 93 years later. We don’t talk about…it. We don’t talk about slavery. We don’t talk about lynchings. We don’t talk about racism. Cindy Hyde-Smith didn’t think twice about the words that were coming out of her mouth that day because those subjects have been willfully ignored by white Mississippians for generations.
Let’s set aside, without forgetting, that Mike Espy has taken positions on the issues that will help Mississippi while Cindy Hyde-Smith cares more about what Donald Trump thinks than what is good for the average Mississippian. Let’s instead talk about the one thing that Cindy Hyde-Smith and every other Republican politician in Mississippi do not want to talk about: the racist history of the state of Mississippi.
Cindy Hyde-Smith was born in Brookhaven, Mississippi. Like a lot of other white Mississippians, she has whiled away many hours researching her family’s story, her genealogy. She cares about the past and the lives that were led by her ancestors. But I can almost guarantee you that she doesn’t know anything about the two black men who were lynched in the town of her birth. If you spend enough time looking at cemetery records and old newspapers, you’ll find the accounts, but it’s easy to skim right past the things that you don’t want to think about. And Cindy Hyde-Smith doesn’t want to think about Thomas Walker and the other black man whose name has been lost in time.
Governor Phil Bryant stood up to defend Cindy Hyde-Smith, who had proven herself entirely incapable of apologizing or even acknowledging a mistake, and he quickly transitioned his remarks to a condemnation of abortion because he knows what his audience wants to hear. Phil Bryant and Cindy Hyde-Smith claim that they care a lot about the lives of the unborn, but I can almost guarantee you that neither one of them knows anything about the two pregnant sisters who were hung to death from a bridge near Shubuta, Mississippi. Witnesses said the babies were still wriggling inside the lifeless bodies of Maggie Howze and Alma Howze.
While serving in the Mississippi legislature, Cindy Hyde-Smith voted in favor of voter ID requirements at least five times. She also voted to include a threat on every absentee ballot envelope: “Penalties for vote fraud are up to five years in prison and a fine of up to Five Thousand Dollars.” The whole reason for those votes is to suppress the black vote because black people tend to vote Democratic. But I can almost guarantee you that Cindy Hyde-Smith’s due diligence in preparation for those votes didn’t involve a refresher on what happened to James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, the three men who were murdered in 1964, when Cindy Hyde-Smith was five years old, for trying to register black people to vote.
We can’t move forward until we accept our past and face our history with open eyes. And Mississippi desperately needs to move forward.
Please, GOTV, make calls, do what you can. This race is winnable. And this race is IMPORTANT.
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