Hangman’s nooses are hateful symbols. They don’t belong on SLO shooting range — or anywhere else
It’s past time to permanently retire the hangman’s noose.
They may have been part of “cowboy culture” in the Old West, but that doesn’t give us license to use them today as “decorations.”
Yet that’s what happened at a shooting range in San Luis Obispo County. Nooses hung there, unnoticed by many, for 10 years until they were finally removed recently following complaints.
This is not an example of “cancel culture.”
Nooses have been used as instruments of racial torture and terror, and for the Black community, they are a repugnant symbol of oppression, hate and gross injustice.
Consider these facts: The nonprofit Equal Justice Initiative has documented 4,084 racial terror lynchings in the South between 1877 and 1950. That number easily could have been even higher.
“Thousands of people fled to the North and West out of fear of being lynched. Parents and spouses sent away loved ones who suddenly found themselves at risk of being lynched for a minor social transgression; they characterized these frantic, desperate escapes as surviving near-lynchings,” the Equal Justice Initiative says in its report, “Lynching in America.”
There can be no dispensation for displaying hangman’s nooses as “cowboy decor.”
Even the California city of Placerville acknowledged as much recently when, after much debate, the City Council unanimously voted to remove a noose from its official city seal — though it will still keep the nickname “Old Hangtown.”
Nooses are such a powerful symbol of racist hatred that several states have passed laws against displaying them.
In California, it’s illegal to display a noose with the intent to terrorize — or with “reckless disregard of the risk of terrorizing” — in certain locations, including schools, universities, public parks and places of employment, punishable by up to a year in jail and a $5,000 fine. The same law applies to swastikas and cross burnings.
The law against nooses took effect in 2010, and was prompted in part by a shameful 2008 incident at Cal Poly, where a noose and a Confederate flag were displayed at the on-campus Crops House.
Similar incidents have occurred at other schools and are often excused as “pranks.”
Can we please get beyond that?
Lynchings have a horrible legacy, including right here in California, where vigilantes killed hundreds of people. Many of the victims were people of color, including 18 Chinese men and boys killed in Los Angeles in 1871.
Closer to home, in 1858, seven men were lynched near what is now Mission Plaza in San Luis Obispo, without benefit of trial, according to John Ashbaugh, president of the History Center of San Luis Obispo County and a former SLO City Council member.
“... Due process rights were certainly forgotten in the hysteria of the vigilante uprising right here in the heart of our community in 1858,” he wrote in a Tribune viewpoint. “We must not forget them now, especially as we engage in our ongoing debate about structural racism and social inequality in San Luis Obispo County.”
Trivializing these lynchings as a colorful part of our Western past is not OK anymore.
It’s time we recognize them for what they were — unlawful murders that usually went unpunished — and put away the nooses forever.