While some have suggested that the hangman’s noose has been deduced to a hoax planted only to get a quick rise from the media and people of color, scholars say there is much to be concerned about.
Experts agree that the highly charged Jena Six case is responsible for the resurgence of nooses. In the months since a noose dangled from a schoolyard tree in Jena, La., the infamous symbol of racial hatred and prejudice has been at the forefront of three high-profile racially charged incidents on college campuses.
The most recent incident at Columbia University in New York sparked a mass demonstration by hundreds of students and faculty members who rallied in protest of the noose found hanging on the office door of Dr. Madonna Constantine, a Black professor, at Columbia’s Teachers College.
A noose hung in September outside the social enclave of Black students at the University of Maryland, College Park kindled a milder public outcry from the community. Then a cadet at the Coast Guard Academy in Connecticut found a noose in his bag, but it wasn’t until a civil rights officer there found a noose in her office that a criminal investigation was launched.
In late 19th century, the lynching of Black people in the South was an institutionalized method used by Whites to terrorize Blacks, and the hangman’s noose served to antagonize. Outside the arena of higher education, the loathsome symbol was spotted at post office near Ground Zero and a firehouse in New York. But the objective of current-day perpetrators is unclear, teetering somewhere between hate and hype.
Michael Meyers, executive director of the New York Civil Rights Coalition, told Newsday, “I must dissent from the surge of racial histrionics and hysteria
over the discovery of a hangman’s noose at one of our campuses. I dissent from the hard and fast conclusion about the incident as a hate crime, even before the investigation is complete. I know the real history of lynchings in America. Whatever happened on Columbia’s campus was no such hate crime, regardless of what the rope symbolizes.”
