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The Death Penalty, Racism and the
     American Practice of Lynching
                                A RACISM REVIEW REPRINT
  Part of the RBG Troy Anthony Davis End the Racist-Classist Death Penalty Studies Collection




Historical Lynching &
Contemporary Death Penalty
Patterns

What’s lynching? As the leading
organization fighting against
lynching, the NAACP developed a
very specific definition of lynching
that includes:

      there must be evidence that
       someone was killed;
      the killing must have
       occurred illegally;
      three or more persons must
       have taken part in the
       killing; and
      the killers must have
       claimed to be serving
       justice or tradition.

This definition remains useful to
researchers today, including the
scholars working on Project HAL:
Historical American Lynching
Data Collection Project.
RBG Communiversity                                                                             Page 1 of 7




          The Death Penalty, Racism and the American
          Practice of Lynching
          September 26, 2011
          By Jessie Daniels
          Source: http://www.racismreview.com/blog/2011/09/23/death-penalty-racism-american-practice-
          lynching/#more-7762

          “A man was lynched yesterday” read the banner that flew outside the NAACP headquarters at 69
          Fifth Avenue in 1938. Some 73 years later, such a banner is still relevant as the American
          practice of lynching continues in ways new and old in the 21st century.




                                    (Image source: Library of Congress, NAACP)

          On Wednesday, in what the typically reserved New York Times called “a grievous wrong,” the
          State of Georgia executed Troy Anthony Davis at 11:08 pm. Albert Camus observed that
          “capital punishment is the most premeditated of murders,” and that was never more true than this
          week when Georgia proceeded with the killing of Mr. Davis in spite of serious doubts about his
          guilt and in spite of national and international media attention about the case, and an outcry from
          various celebrities and luminaries including President Jimmy Carter and Pope Benedict XVI.
          Much of the outrage is that there was simply too much doubt (as the Twitter hashtag
          #toomuchdoubt suggested) about Davis’ guilt. There was no physical evidence linking Davis to
          the crime for which he was convicted, and 7 of the 9 witnesses recanted their testimony. If
          Georgia ends up exonerating Davis, it wouldn’t be the first time that state later recanted it’s
          prosecution of an African American accused of killing a white person, but it may take




          The Death Penalty, Racism and the American Practice of Lynching                    Jessie Daniels
RBG Communiversity                                                                              Page 2 of 7


          awhile. Sixty years after Lena Baker, an African American woman, was convicted – and
          executed – for killing a white man, the State of Georgia exonerated her.

          The other part of the outrage about this case has to do with the systemic racism of the death
          penalty: Davis was African American and the victim in this case, Mark MacPhail, was white
          (and an off-duty cop). Some have even referred to the execution of Davis as a “legal lynching,”
          an especially ironic phrase given that the case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court which
          refused to stay the execution with no dissents from the bench, not even from Justice Thomas,
          who once claimed to be a victim of “high-tech lynching” because of Anita Hill’s charges of
          sexual harassment. But, perhaps this is just hyperbole. What is lynching? Is there any evidence
          that links the American practice of lynching to the death penalty?

          Historical Lynching & Contemporary Death Penalty Patterns

          What’s lynching? As the leading organization fighting against lynching, the NAACP developed
          a very specific definition of lynching that includes: 1) there must be evidence that someone was
          killed; 2) the killing must have occurred illegally; 3) three or more persons must have taken part
          in the killing; and 4) the killers must have claimed to be serving justice or tradition. This
          definition remains useful to researchers today, including the scholars working on Project HAL:
          Historical American Lynching Data Collection Project.

          Race & Lynching. The peak period of lynching in the U.S. was from 1882-1930, and estimates
          are that some 4,742 people have been lynched in the U.S. (through 1968). What not everyone
          realizes is that lynching has taken place in almost every state in the U.S., and victims have been
          of a variety of racial and ethnic backgrounds. In fact, from 1882-1886, whites made up a
          majority of those lynched, almost exclusively at the hands of other whites. This began to change
          in 1886 which was something of a tipping point. In 1886, 64 whites and 74 African Americans
          were lynched, but by 1898, 101 lynching victims were black compared to just 19 whites; and by
          1919 and the notorious “Red Summer” there were only 7 whites lynched compared to 76
          blacks. The context for this historical period is, of course, the response to the Reconstruction Era
          following the Civil War. After some progress by African Americans following the war, whites
          launched an insurgent movement to reassert white supremacy. From 1890 to 1908, white-elite-



          The Death Penalty, Racism and the American Practice of Lynching                    Jessie Daniels
RBG Communiversity                                                                                Page 3 of 7


          dominated state legislatures passed disfranchising constitutions that effectively barred most
          African Americans (and many poor whites) from voting. This legal disfranchisement was
          reinforced by the extra-legal pattern of lynching.

          Geography of Lynching. During its peak, historical lynching followed certain geographic, racial
          patterns. Lynching was more common in the South, not necessarily because white Southerners
          were more racist than their Northern counterparts, but rather that is where most African
          Americans lived. However, a county-by-county analysis of the HAL data looking at percentage
          of population that was African American and the rate of reported lynchings suggests that
          percentage of population alone was not enough to predict where lynchings might occur. Yet,
          when African Americans began to leave the South in significant numbers with the Great
          Migration, the number of lynchings began to decline. Historical lynching patterns also suggest a
          systemic racism that intersects with class and gender.

          Class, Gender & Lynching. In terms of class, fluctuations in the market economy affected the
          rate of lynching. Beck and Tolnay found that lynching was “an integral element of an
          agricultural economy that required a large, cheap, and docile labor force” which was a
          continuation of a plantation economy (“The Killing Fields of the Deep South: The Market for
          Cotton and the Lynching of Blacks,” American Sociological Review, 55 (4, August, 1990):526-
          539. Further, Beck and Tolnay found that there was an inverse correlation between the price of
          cotton and lynching, such that as cotton prices fell, the number of lynchings rose.

          African American women were lynched while the predominant pattern was that African
          American men were the primary targets of the practice of lynching. Ida B. Wells-Barnett,
          journalist and activist, wrote The Red Record in 1895 about lynching and noted the class and
          gender dynamics that were evident at the time. Wells-Barnett first got involved in the anti-
          lynching crusade after she witnessed the lynching of an African American grocer, seen as too
          economically successful by white citizens. Historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall’s Revolt Against
          Chivalry also patriarchal racial and gendered orders that were shored up by the practice of
          lynching. Wells-Barnett, and 100 years later Hall, both note the way that the “defense of white
          womanhood” was used as a justifying ideology for lynching black men, often falsely accused of
          rape.



          The Death Penalty, Racism and the American Practice of Lynching                       Jessie Daniels
RBG Communiversity                                                                             Page 4 of 7


          Over this span of this reign of terror, the most conservative estimate is that 3,445 African
          Americans were lynched by whites; other estimates, like that of Wells-Barnett are much higher,
          near 10,000. According to one researcher, lynching was an “historically significant, but
          statistically rare event.” In many ways, this statistical assessment diminishes the reality of
          lynching’s effectiveness as a weapon of terrorism used by whites against blacks.

          Terrorism is always a “statistically rare event” but that doesn’t make it any less effective as a
          tool of domination, in fact it may work in quite the opposite way. So, while historical lynching
          wasn’t exclusively a racist act, it was used as a weapon of racial domination especially after
          1886.

          Legal Execution, Legal Lynching?

          The execution of Troy Davis has a lot of people using the term “legal lynching” to describe that
          heinous act. Typically, when people use this term, it’s meant to convey the injustice done when
          a person who may not be guilty is executed by the state, as in the book Legal Lynching by Senior
          and Junior Jesse Jackson. The folks at The Innocence Project work on getting wrongful
          convictions overturned and this is important. Beyond wrongful convictions, there are other
          similarities between historical lynching and the contemporary death penalty.

          Race & the Death Penalty. A 2007 study of death sentences in Connecticut conducted by Yale
          University School of Law revealed that African-American defendants receive the death
          penalty at three times the rate of white defendants in cases where the victims are white. In
          addition, killers of white victims are treated more severely than people who kill people of
          color when it comes to deciding what charges to bring.




          The Death Penalty, Racism and the American Practice of Lynching                    Jessie Daniels
RBG Communiversity                                                                             Page 5 of 7


          (Source: Amnesty International, Death Penalty & Race)

          Geography & the Death Penalty. States that sentence the most people to death also tend to be
          the states that had the most historical lynchings. Researchers found that the number of death
          sentences were higher in states with a history of lynchings. The findings showed a clear link
          between the number of lynchings, the proportions of African Americans in the states, and the
          number of death sentences. This research also found that the number of death sentences increases
          in states after a growth in the population of Blacks. But the number of death sentences begins to
          go down once the population of African Americans reaches a threshold of about 20 to 22 percent
          (David Jacobs, Jason T. Carmichael, Stephanie L. Kent, “Vigilantism, Current Racial Threat, and
          Death Sentences,” American Sociological Review, Vol. 70, No. 4 (Aug., 2005):656-677).

          Poverty & the Death Penalty. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall observed that the
          death penalty was unfair to the poor (among several other groups). And indeed, the death penalty
          is disproportionately applied to those who are poor. Of course, the death penalty is an extension
          of the broader carceral system that snares the poor in this society, as Jeffrey Reiman of American
          University has pointed out in multiple editions of his book, The Rich Get Richer and the Poor
          Get Prison.

          Gender & the Death Penalty. In a study by Professor Steven Shatz of the University of San
          Francisco Law School and Naomi Shatz of the New York Civil Liberties Union suggests gender
          influences the death penalty, and that this bias has roots in the historic notion of chivalry. In a
          review of 1,300 murder cases in California between 2003 and 2005, the authors found gender
          disparities with respect to both defendants and victims in the underlying crime. The authors
          concluded “the death penalty is imposed on women relatively infrequently and that it is
          disproportionately imposed for the killing of women. Thus, the death penalty in California
          appears to be applied in accordance with stereotypes about women’s innate abilities, their roles
          in society, and their capacity for violence. Far from being gender neutral, the California death
          penalty seems to allow prejudices and stereotypes about violence and gender, chivalric values, to
          determine who lives and who dies.” The researchers go on to note that “[b]ecause women are
          stereotyped as weak, passive, and in need of male protection, prosecutors and juries seem
          reluctant to impose the death penalty upon them.” On the other hand, in cases where the victim



          The Death Penalty, Racism and the American Practice of Lynching                   Jessie Daniels
RBG Communiversity                                                                            Page 6 of 7


          was a woman, the death sentence rate was 10.9%, seven times the rate when men were victims
          (1.5%).

          Taken together, there are a lot of similarities between historical lynching and the “legal
          lynching” of state-sponsored executions.

          But what about those “extra-legal” killings? Surely those have ended are no longer part of the
          contemporary patterns. Yes and no.

          Contemporary Lynchings & Capital Punishment

          There were actually two executions on Wednesday of this week. The other took place in Texas
          where Lawrence Russell Brewer was executed for his part in the dragging death of James Byrd
          in 1998. In case you don’t remember or aren’t familiar with the case, Brewer and two other
          white men kidnapped the 49-year-old James Byrd one night just outside Jasper, Texas. Then,
          they chained Byrd by the ankles to the back of a pickup truck and dragged him for 3 ½ miles
          down a country road until he was dead. Prosecutors said the crime, which they described it as
          one of the most vicious hate crimes in U.S. history, was intended to promote Brewer’s fledgling
          white supremacist organization. During his 1999 trial, they called Brewer a racist psychopath.
          Today, we use the term “hate crime” but we really should be connecting these kinds of acts to
          the historical pattern of lynching. The killing of Mr. Byrd certainly fits the definition of
          “lynching” and is similar to those in the historical pattern of lynching.

          The real anomaly here is that Brewer, who is white, was sentenced to death for killing a black
          man.

          More recently, in August of this year, James Craig Anderson, a 49-year-old auto plant worker,
          was standing in a parking lot, near his car two carloads of white teenagers drove up and attacked
          him. The white teens allegedly beat Anderson repeatedly, yelled racial epithets, including “White
          Power!” according to witnesses. The attackers then climbed into their large Ford F250 green
          pickup truck, floored the gas, and drove the truck right over Anderson, killing him instantly. The
          brutal attack was caught on videotape. All the evidence suggests that those who attacked Mr.
          Anderson will not face capital punishment because they are white and Mr. Anderson was black.


          The Death Penalty, Racism and the American Practice of Lynching                  Jessie Daniels
RBG Communiversity                                                                             Page 7 of 7


          (Subsequent reports have also identified Mr. Anderson as gay and living with a long-term partner
          of 20 years, societal homophobia combined with racism makes even a conviction in this case
          questionable.)

          It’s these “grotesque levels of racial bias” that affect the capital punishment system and part of
          what prompted an earlier Supreme Court to rule that the death penalty could not be applied fairly
          so should be stopped. The current Supreme Court has not revealed any similar heroes for our
          time.

          The End of the Death Penalty

          Some have suggested that the intense level of attention surrounding the execution of Mr. Davis
          will mean the end of the death penalty. I hope those predictions come true, I really do.

          Yet, when I see the cheering from a crowd over people dying – dying by state-sponsored lethal
          injection or the slower death by neoliberalism from a lack of health care – it frankly makes me
          question how strong our collective political will might be for ending the death penalty.

          To me, there’s no doubt that there are people who’ve committed heinous crimes that may not
          deserve to live – Brewer comes to mind for his lynching of James Byrd – but I don’t think that
          state-sponsored killing, as Camus observed – the most premeditated of murders – solves
          anything. In fact, it makes us all worse for its existence.

          It’s really about what kind of a society we want to be. From what I sit, I think we need to do
          better, much better, than state-sponsored death.




          The Death Penalty, Racism and the American Practice of Lynching                   Jessie Daniels

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The Death Penalty, Racism and the American Practice of Lynching, Jessie Daniels

  • 1. The Death Penalty, Racism and the American Practice of Lynching A RACISM REVIEW REPRINT Part of the RBG Troy Anthony Davis End the Racist-Classist Death Penalty Studies Collection Historical Lynching & Contemporary Death Penalty Patterns What’s lynching? As the leading organization fighting against lynching, the NAACP developed a very specific definition of lynching that includes:  there must be evidence that someone was killed;  the killing must have occurred illegally;  three or more persons must have taken part in the killing; and  the killers must have claimed to be serving justice or tradition. This definition remains useful to researchers today, including the scholars working on Project HAL: Historical American Lynching Data Collection Project.
  • 2. RBG Communiversity Page 1 of 7 The Death Penalty, Racism and the American Practice of Lynching September 26, 2011 By Jessie Daniels Source: http://www.racismreview.com/blog/2011/09/23/death-penalty-racism-american-practice- lynching/#more-7762 “A man was lynched yesterday” read the banner that flew outside the NAACP headquarters at 69 Fifth Avenue in 1938. Some 73 years later, such a banner is still relevant as the American practice of lynching continues in ways new and old in the 21st century. (Image source: Library of Congress, NAACP) On Wednesday, in what the typically reserved New York Times called “a grievous wrong,” the State of Georgia executed Troy Anthony Davis at 11:08 pm. Albert Camus observed that “capital punishment is the most premeditated of murders,” and that was never more true than this week when Georgia proceeded with the killing of Mr. Davis in spite of serious doubts about his guilt and in spite of national and international media attention about the case, and an outcry from various celebrities and luminaries including President Jimmy Carter and Pope Benedict XVI. Much of the outrage is that there was simply too much doubt (as the Twitter hashtag #toomuchdoubt suggested) about Davis’ guilt. There was no physical evidence linking Davis to the crime for which he was convicted, and 7 of the 9 witnesses recanted their testimony. If Georgia ends up exonerating Davis, it wouldn’t be the first time that state later recanted it’s prosecution of an African American accused of killing a white person, but it may take The Death Penalty, Racism and the American Practice of Lynching Jessie Daniels
  • 3. RBG Communiversity Page 2 of 7 awhile. Sixty years after Lena Baker, an African American woman, was convicted – and executed – for killing a white man, the State of Georgia exonerated her. The other part of the outrage about this case has to do with the systemic racism of the death penalty: Davis was African American and the victim in this case, Mark MacPhail, was white (and an off-duty cop). Some have even referred to the execution of Davis as a “legal lynching,” an especially ironic phrase given that the case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court which refused to stay the execution with no dissents from the bench, not even from Justice Thomas, who once claimed to be a victim of “high-tech lynching” because of Anita Hill’s charges of sexual harassment. But, perhaps this is just hyperbole. What is lynching? Is there any evidence that links the American practice of lynching to the death penalty? Historical Lynching & Contemporary Death Penalty Patterns What’s lynching? As the leading organization fighting against lynching, the NAACP developed a very specific definition of lynching that includes: 1) there must be evidence that someone was killed; 2) the killing must have occurred illegally; 3) three or more persons must have taken part in the killing; and 4) the killers must have claimed to be serving justice or tradition. This definition remains useful to researchers today, including the scholars working on Project HAL: Historical American Lynching Data Collection Project. Race & Lynching. The peak period of lynching in the U.S. was from 1882-1930, and estimates are that some 4,742 people have been lynched in the U.S. (through 1968). What not everyone realizes is that lynching has taken place in almost every state in the U.S., and victims have been of a variety of racial and ethnic backgrounds. In fact, from 1882-1886, whites made up a majority of those lynched, almost exclusively at the hands of other whites. This began to change in 1886 which was something of a tipping point. In 1886, 64 whites and 74 African Americans were lynched, but by 1898, 101 lynching victims were black compared to just 19 whites; and by 1919 and the notorious “Red Summer” there were only 7 whites lynched compared to 76 blacks. The context for this historical period is, of course, the response to the Reconstruction Era following the Civil War. After some progress by African Americans following the war, whites launched an insurgent movement to reassert white supremacy. From 1890 to 1908, white-elite- The Death Penalty, Racism and the American Practice of Lynching Jessie Daniels
  • 4. RBG Communiversity Page 3 of 7 dominated state legislatures passed disfranchising constitutions that effectively barred most African Americans (and many poor whites) from voting. This legal disfranchisement was reinforced by the extra-legal pattern of lynching. Geography of Lynching. During its peak, historical lynching followed certain geographic, racial patterns. Lynching was more common in the South, not necessarily because white Southerners were more racist than their Northern counterparts, but rather that is where most African Americans lived. However, a county-by-county analysis of the HAL data looking at percentage of population that was African American and the rate of reported lynchings suggests that percentage of population alone was not enough to predict where lynchings might occur. Yet, when African Americans began to leave the South in significant numbers with the Great Migration, the number of lynchings began to decline. Historical lynching patterns also suggest a systemic racism that intersects with class and gender. Class, Gender & Lynching. In terms of class, fluctuations in the market economy affected the rate of lynching. Beck and Tolnay found that lynching was “an integral element of an agricultural economy that required a large, cheap, and docile labor force” which was a continuation of a plantation economy (“The Killing Fields of the Deep South: The Market for Cotton and the Lynching of Blacks,” American Sociological Review, 55 (4, August, 1990):526- 539. Further, Beck and Tolnay found that there was an inverse correlation between the price of cotton and lynching, such that as cotton prices fell, the number of lynchings rose. African American women were lynched while the predominant pattern was that African American men were the primary targets of the practice of lynching. Ida B. Wells-Barnett, journalist and activist, wrote The Red Record in 1895 about lynching and noted the class and gender dynamics that were evident at the time. Wells-Barnett first got involved in the anti- lynching crusade after she witnessed the lynching of an African American grocer, seen as too economically successful by white citizens. Historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall’s Revolt Against Chivalry also patriarchal racial and gendered orders that were shored up by the practice of lynching. Wells-Barnett, and 100 years later Hall, both note the way that the “defense of white womanhood” was used as a justifying ideology for lynching black men, often falsely accused of rape. The Death Penalty, Racism and the American Practice of Lynching Jessie Daniels
  • 5. RBG Communiversity Page 4 of 7 Over this span of this reign of terror, the most conservative estimate is that 3,445 African Americans were lynched by whites; other estimates, like that of Wells-Barnett are much higher, near 10,000. According to one researcher, lynching was an “historically significant, but statistically rare event.” In many ways, this statistical assessment diminishes the reality of lynching’s effectiveness as a weapon of terrorism used by whites against blacks. Terrorism is always a “statistically rare event” but that doesn’t make it any less effective as a tool of domination, in fact it may work in quite the opposite way. So, while historical lynching wasn’t exclusively a racist act, it was used as a weapon of racial domination especially after 1886. Legal Execution, Legal Lynching? The execution of Troy Davis has a lot of people using the term “legal lynching” to describe that heinous act. Typically, when people use this term, it’s meant to convey the injustice done when a person who may not be guilty is executed by the state, as in the book Legal Lynching by Senior and Junior Jesse Jackson. The folks at The Innocence Project work on getting wrongful convictions overturned and this is important. Beyond wrongful convictions, there are other similarities between historical lynching and the contemporary death penalty. Race & the Death Penalty. A 2007 study of death sentences in Connecticut conducted by Yale University School of Law revealed that African-American defendants receive the death penalty at three times the rate of white defendants in cases where the victims are white. In addition, killers of white victims are treated more severely than people who kill people of color when it comes to deciding what charges to bring. The Death Penalty, Racism and the American Practice of Lynching Jessie Daniels
  • 6. RBG Communiversity Page 5 of 7 (Source: Amnesty International, Death Penalty & Race) Geography & the Death Penalty. States that sentence the most people to death also tend to be the states that had the most historical lynchings. Researchers found that the number of death sentences were higher in states with a history of lynchings. The findings showed a clear link between the number of lynchings, the proportions of African Americans in the states, and the number of death sentences. This research also found that the number of death sentences increases in states after a growth in the population of Blacks. But the number of death sentences begins to go down once the population of African Americans reaches a threshold of about 20 to 22 percent (David Jacobs, Jason T. Carmichael, Stephanie L. Kent, “Vigilantism, Current Racial Threat, and Death Sentences,” American Sociological Review, Vol. 70, No. 4 (Aug., 2005):656-677). Poverty & the Death Penalty. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall observed that the death penalty was unfair to the poor (among several other groups). And indeed, the death penalty is disproportionately applied to those who are poor. Of course, the death penalty is an extension of the broader carceral system that snares the poor in this society, as Jeffrey Reiman of American University has pointed out in multiple editions of his book, The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison. Gender & the Death Penalty. In a study by Professor Steven Shatz of the University of San Francisco Law School and Naomi Shatz of the New York Civil Liberties Union suggests gender influences the death penalty, and that this bias has roots in the historic notion of chivalry. In a review of 1,300 murder cases in California between 2003 and 2005, the authors found gender disparities with respect to both defendants and victims in the underlying crime. The authors concluded “the death penalty is imposed on women relatively infrequently and that it is disproportionately imposed for the killing of women. Thus, the death penalty in California appears to be applied in accordance with stereotypes about women’s innate abilities, their roles in society, and their capacity for violence. Far from being gender neutral, the California death penalty seems to allow prejudices and stereotypes about violence and gender, chivalric values, to determine who lives and who dies.” The researchers go on to note that “[b]ecause women are stereotyped as weak, passive, and in need of male protection, prosecutors and juries seem reluctant to impose the death penalty upon them.” On the other hand, in cases where the victim The Death Penalty, Racism and the American Practice of Lynching Jessie Daniels
  • 7. RBG Communiversity Page 6 of 7 was a woman, the death sentence rate was 10.9%, seven times the rate when men were victims (1.5%). Taken together, there are a lot of similarities between historical lynching and the “legal lynching” of state-sponsored executions. But what about those “extra-legal” killings? Surely those have ended are no longer part of the contemporary patterns. Yes and no. Contemporary Lynchings & Capital Punishment There were actually two executions on Wednesday of this week. The other took place in Texas where Lawrence Russell Brewer was executed for his part in the dragging death of James Byrd in 1998. In case you don’t remember or aren’t familiar with the case, Brewer and two other white men kidnapped the 49-year-old James Byrd one night just outside Jasper, Texas. Then, they chained Byrd by the ankles to the back of a pickup truck and dragged him for 3 ½ miles down a country road until he was dead. Prosecutors said the crime, which they described it as one of the most vicious hate crimes in U.S. history, was intended to promote Brewer’s fledgling white supremacist organization. During his 1999 trial, they called Brewer a racist psychopath. Today, we use the term “hate crime” but we really should be connecting these kinds of acts to the historical pattern of lynching. The killing of Mr. Byrd certainly fits the definition of “lynching” and is similar to those in the historical pattern of lynching. The real anomaly here is that Brewer, who is white, was sentenced to death for killing a black man. More recently, in August of this year, James Craig Anderson, a 49-year-old auto plant worker, was standing in a parking lot, near his car two carloads of white teenagers drove up and attacked him. The white teens allegedly beat Anderson repeatedly, yelled racial epithets, including “White Power!” according to witnesses. The attackers then climbed into their large Ford F250 green pickup truck, floored the gas, and drove the truck right over Anderson, killing him instantly. The brutal attack was caught on videotape. All the evidence suggests that those who attacked Mr. Anderson will not face capital punishment because they are white and Mr. Anderson was black. The Death Penalty, Racism and the American Practice of Lynching Jessie Daniels
  • 8. RBG Communiversity Page 7 of 7 (Subsequent reports have also identified Mr. Anderson as gay and living with a long-term partner of 20 years, societal homophobia combined with racism makes even a conviction in this case questionable.) It’s these “grotesque levels of racial bias” that affect the capital punishment system and part of what prompted an earlier Supreme Court to rule that the death penalty could not be applied fairly so should be stopped. The current Supreme Court has not revealed any similar heroes for our time. The End of the Death Penalty Some have suggested that the intense level of attention surrounding the execution of Mr. Davis will mean the end of the death penalty. I hope those predictions come true, I really do. Yet, when I see the cheering from a crowd over people dying – dying by state-sponsored lethal injection or the slower death by neoliberalism from a lack of health care – it frankly makes me question how strong our collective political will might be for ending the death penalty. To me, there’s no doubt that there are people who’ve committed heinous crimes that may not deserve to live – Brewer comes to mind for his lynching of James Byrd – but I don’t think that state-sponsored killing, as Camus observed – the most premeditated of murders – solves anything. In fact, it makes us all worse for its existence. It’s really about what kind of a society we want to be. From what I sit, I think we need to do better, much better, than state-sponsored death. The Death Penalty, Racism and the American Practice of Lynching Jessie Daniels