Reading of the deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Walter Scott, and Freddie Gray takes me back to Angelou's line: "The black woman in the south who raises sons, grandsons and nephews had her heartstrings tied to a hanging noose".
A hanging noose found dangling on the office door of Madonna Constantine, a black race relations expert at Columbia University, is supposedly proof positive of the hate wave.
We can assemble in a city square and chant threats of physical violence against our elected officials, while holding DIY hanging nooses as symbolic banners.
Lewis Holman Brooklyn, Sept. 26, 2007 To the Editor: After reading the Op-Ed article by Reed Walters, I can only say that if he and the Louisiana Legislature think that hanging nooses is not a hate crime, I am very grateful that I don't live in Louisiana.
(A few in the "copycat" camp pointed to the Jena Six case in Louisiana, in which six black youths were arrested last year and accused of beating a white youth who they thought was involved in hanging nooses from a tree at Jena High School. The tree was a "whites-only" preserve).
The flurry of hanging nooses around the country may be a case in point.
"We're hanging nooses to remind people that times haven't changed," read one of the signs, NBC News reported Tuesday.
There's no evidence that the hanging nooses are anything other than what they appear, namely sick, racial digs.
But even before Trump's election ushered in a new era of hate, intolerance, and bigotry, hardly a week went by without a report somewhere of hanging nooses, white hoods, racist graffiti, racial slurs and taunts aimed at minority students.
Last Tuesday, for example, a city employee in Slidell, La., was fired after being accused of hanging a noose at a job site a few days earlier.
On Thursday night, a third incident, a student's hanging a noose from a bookcase in the main library, spurred a large, multicultural mass of chanting and drumming students to occupy the chancellor's office for several hours on Friday and fed a simmering, some say much-needed, debate over race relations.
