Comments

1. P Flanagan 07/26/2010 - 1:10 pm

   “in fact, he was only beaten to death by the sheriff and a mob…the definition of the word “lynch” includes forms of murder other than hanging.”

   You are being hyperbolic and uncharitably increasing the level of vitriol. Sherrod’s father was shot by a neighbor in a dispute. You might consider the following apparent miscarriage of justice in not convicting the killer a “lynching”, but all you do with such exaggerations is give the NAACP bashers another instance of overreaction to point to.

   In any case “beaten to death” is completely untrue, even in a metaphorical sense.

2. Eduardo Peñalver 07/26/2010 - 1:21 pm  contributor

   I inadvertently said “father” when I should have said “relative” (the man in question was named Bobby Hall and Sherrod identifed him as a “relative” in her speech). I’ve fixed the post to eliminate the error (which I thank you for bringing to my attention, though that wasn’t your intention, apparently). If you actually click through to the reprehensible Spectator article, you’ll see that I’ve not misrepresenting anything about it. He was talking about the Hall case, not Sherrod’s father. And he calls her a liar for saying the man was lynched.

3. William Lindsey 07/26/2010 - 8:26 pm

   You’re absolutely correct in noting that lynching of people of color have comprised all sorts of violent assaults, Eduardo. I’ve been tracking the history of lynchings in the late 19th century in my home state of Arkansas. I’m doing this as part of a writing project focusing on a family some of whose members were lynched in the 1890s.

   The ways in which African Americans–usually, but not always, African-American men–were put to death violently in the Jim Crow period are horrifying. They included hanging, dismemberment, burning to death, shooting, beating to death, and so forth.

   Lynchings were a brutal, effective tool of control, intended to frighten people so that they became passive and accepted the removal of rights possessed by other groups. And they continued well into the 20th century. The last horrifying lynching in Little Rock occurred towards the end of the 1920s, when a mentally disabled African-American man was seized by a mob who thought that a white girl had been raped and killed by another African-American man.

   The lynched man was shot and beaten to death, his body was chopped up, and it was set on fire and burned in the middle of the city. Some of the wood for the fire came from pews seized by the crowd from a nearby black Methodist church.

4. Bill Mazzella 07/27/2010 - 2:35 pm  subscriber

   Boy, does E.J. Dionne get it right when he says that Fox News has convinced journalists that they have to give equal time to right wing rants. “The mainstream media and the Obama administration alike must stop cowering before a right wing that has persistently forced its own propaganda to be accepted as news by persuading traditional journalists that “fairness” requires treating extremist rants as “one side of the story.” http://commonwealmagazine.org/enough-enough

5. Luke Hill 07/29/2010 - 7:59 am  subscriber

   Just so we’re all clear:

   Shirley Sherrod is on videotape in 2010 telling the story of how in the 1980s, when she was working for an organization whose mission was to help black farmers, ended up helping a white farmer save his farm and how they became lifelong friends.

   In 1965, when she was 17, her father was shot in the back and killed by a white neighbor—who suffered no legal punishment.

   In a case that went to the Supreme Court in the 1940s, an ancestor of hers was arrested and beaten to death—in public—by three white men—who suffered no legal punishment.

   In our Catholic tradition we have a word for people like Shirley Sherrod who dedicate their lives to helping the poor and oppressed, and who overcome the structural evils of their times. We call them saints. (Some small percentage of them we canonize.)

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment