Extrajudicial Murder

I have been reading a book called Grassroots Garveyism about the Black nationalist movement in the American South in the second and third decades of the twentieth century.  This morning I was reading about the Elaine, Arkansas massacres of October 1919.  Black sharecroppers had been cheated of their payments for the cotton crop as a matter of routine, but that year the (shorted) payments were also held up for months while the white minority "planters" spent time "calculating" what they wanted to owe.  The Black farmers met at a local church to discuss their options, including the possibilities of forming a union or filing a class action lawsuit.

In the Arkansas Delta, and throughout the Black Belt South, whites were very conscious of how few they were compared to African Americans and they routinely employed terror along with voter suppression to maintain their power. Phillips County is still 63% African American today.  In 1919 it was 74%.  Understanding the dangers, the people meeting in the church set out armed pickets.  A white deputy sheriff and a railroad detective found the meeting and engaged in a shootout with the guards.

What followed was a days-long massacre.  A "sheriff's posse", the Arkansas National Guard, and US Army regulars killed at least 200 (and possibly four times that number) Black people in the county.  The soldiers arrested another 285.  Sham trials, only minutes long, sentenced more people to death and to long prison sentences.

We have recently seen how the St. Louis County prosecutor transformed what was supposed to be a grand jury investigation of Michael Brown's murder by a police officer into a trial of Michael Brown for his own murder with the DA acting as Police Officer Wilson's attorney and nobody speaking for Michael Brown.  But we also saw how the press tried Michael Brown in the court of public opinion.  They chose pictures of him that showed him throwing up hand signs.  They aired video of him in an altercation at a convenience store that Officer Wilson could not have known about.  When you hear people make statements like "That boy was no angel," then you know that the campaign of press vilification worked.  It is as if his extrajudicial murder was somehow justified.

We also saw how the press preferred to cover fires in Ferguson to protests against the abuse of process that has allowed Officer Wilson to walk free.  I am quite certain that at least two of those fires were not set by Black residents of Ferguson or by protestors supporting them.  The fire at Michael Brown, Sr's church was clearly set by white supremacists.  One of the auto parts stores was set afire by some kind of uniformed paramilitary far from any protestors, too, as documented by a YouTube video of the fire.  But what is more important is that TV news prefers to cover night time fires and that this is the story they are telling us about the aftermath of the grand jury decision.

This morning I awoke to find that two members of the New Black Panthers were arrested for plotting to murder the DA and to blow up the Gateway Arch.  I don't know whether the charges are true.  What I do know is that Officer Wilson was exonerated for actually murdering Michael Brown.  And I also know that local authorities and their friends in the press are very good at telling white people stories about how scary these Black folks are, and why it is necessary to treat their communities as war zones.

Let's go back to 1919 for a moment.  How did  the press explain these massacres in a rural cotton county?  The headlines in the paper, after days of white mob violence read: "Negroes Plan to Kill All Whites."  That's right.  A discussion about organizing a union or a lawsuit  was transformed by the authorities and the editors into a mass murder plot!  And the actual mass murder -- of hundreds of Black people -- disappeared entirely from the news.

We Americans have short historical memories.  And the use of the word "lynching" has somehow been ruled to be hyperbole, regardless of how aptly it may describe what is going on.  But the parallels are clear.  Michael Brown was lynched by the police.  He was posthumously lynched by the prosecutor and the press.  And it may be that these charges against the New Black Panthers represent a continuation of that lynching.