Not long after Hurricane Katrina's devastating outcomes were aired on television, a national media organization asked Americans if racism played a part in the government's response to the people of New Orleans. About 75% of Caucasian respondents said "no." About 75% of African American respondents said "yes." These responses tell us that the only way we, as a nation, can understand perception of current events is by revisiting our past. Too often, Caucasians deny that the past is no longer relevant, but when they come face to face with this country's shameful recent history, they cannot deny the linkages between past and present. Too often, young African Americans believe that we have made little progress in the past 50 years. Revisiting our history helps them understand that much has changed, and that with effort by all Americans, we can create a future where skin color is only relevant as history.

Sent by D.B. | 5:08 PM ET | 03-07-2007

Nice segment about a painful topic. I liked how each guest provided different perspectives on lynching from their respective disciplines.

I would've found a comparison to the public events that lynching were to the beheadings in Europe from a couple hundred years ago. Wasn't the guillotine used in public during France's turbulent times? What makes such gore a spectator event? Was it entertainment in Europe but a public warning in our country?

Sent by Steve Petersen | 5:42 PM ET | 03-07-2007

We, as a society, must confront and explore and, perhaps, come to terms with such horrors as lynching - a deeply criminal act in which the victim was not always African-American.
How many species imagine differences and then use those "differences" to justify the taking of the life of another of the same species? Difference which may be skin pigmentation, a dubious distinction at best, or internalized thoughts/beliefs about "god" or other delusions.
Sometimes the only comforting thought is that the natural history of every species is extinction. And in the case of ours, that outcome may not be a bad thing. But, by extinction, what is meant is the Darwinian model, based in fact, not the "rapture" or the "end days" based in a cruel delusion about one subset surviving while all the others die. But. I guess we are back to lynching.

Sent by Gene Andes | 12:05 AM ET | 03-08-2007

With topic, we are reminded just how how much shame that lynching in this country still generates.

I applaud NPR, Ms. Martin and her esteemed guests for their academic research and efforts to bring the history of lynching and the psychological scars that still remain to the national dialogue. As they both agreed, their efforts and those of other researchers to plant the seeds for dialogue and to encourage the painful past to be addressed for healing are essential--especially on the local level in our communities.

I am hopeful that the research and subsequent book by Law Professor Ifil and the effort by former Professor Stewart did plant additional seeds to address lynching, move us from shame to understanding and healing. Ignoring our painful past of lynching in this country does not make it go away.

Again, thank you for continuing to bring the topic of lynching to the national dialogue.

Sent by Lucinda M. Nobles | 6:24 AM ET | 03-08-2007

I think that reviewing the past, particularly regarding topics such as lynching, are helpful only if those who are sympathetic to the idea of lynching were somehow able to be identified and gathered together to be confronted by those who were victims or relatives of victims of lynching. Too often, topics that society en masse has no personal experience with are responded to by that same inexperienced society as if their cognitive interpretations of the event have the merit and weight of one actually experiencing those things.
In the same way, slavery of African Americans is something none of us today have experienced, and are therefore, in my opinion, not entitled to hold a grudge against. I've been an African American man all my 46 years, but I have yet to experience the incessant cruelties of being under the slave owner's whip. I have experienced the raw, relentless racism of the '60s and '70s growing up in Chicago, but it would not be seemly for me to hold grudges against those I live with today in Alabama for my experiences 40 years ago. Yet, I think dialogue is extremely useful, when it can be engaged with open minds, with those who insist on holding on to antiquated racist ideas under the thinly veiled justification of chronological snobbery.

Sent by Leonard Adams | 10:10 AM ET | 03-08-2007

WHen I moved to Louisa, VA I was often reminded by locals that the big oak tree on the court house lawn is revered by whites as the lynching tool used to hang many a black citiznen. Even today some 27 yrs later, I see it and am reminded every time I go to town.

Sent by Annie Holland | 10:12 AM ET | 03-08-2007

I was aghast at some of the revelations I heard in the recent film "Borat" in regards to racism, sexism, and nationalism. We should continue to study and remember the past...but looking presently at "acceptable" forces such as our military, police, and prison systems...lynching is still ever present as a result of our cognitive capability to dehumanize. We must train ourselves to intentionally humanize, to empathize, in order to reconcile our past and present.

Sent by Kyle Meyers | 12:53 PM ET | 03-08-2007

It is quietly known that the water towers in my town in Colorado were former sites of cross burnings- they could be seen for 20+ miles all around. No one talks about it. But we are a mostly white community. And different things in our capital are/were named after KKK leaders. This state was one of the last KKK holdouts. This needs to be opened back up and actualized within our current culture and community. Good idea.

Sent by Christy | 1:13 PM ET | 03-08-2007

I, too, applaud this subject and the intelligent way it was addressed in these interviews. MORE!

Please don???t think the KKK is dead, or even sleeping. Please don???t think these issues are dead or ignored. They are here under the surface in every town. Tangible reminders exist as well as family legend and community rumors.

Dragging these issues out into the light is an excellent way of dealing with the acts, their legacy, and prevent future lynching. It can happen.

I just wish we could prosecute!

Sent by Carol | 4:27 PM ET | 03-08-2007

I was 30 years old when I found out that my ancestors were slave owners. I found out by chance, when I met a descendent of one of those slaves. Since then, I have spent many years researching both my family's history and my country's history, so to better understand the two. I hope someday to help the descendents of my family's slaves learn more about their past.
It is a difficult past to explore in the present - for reasons of both pain and disconnect - but it is ever alive and ever important that we confront it, learn about it, and discuss it, to the best of our abilities.
I applaud NPR for looking at this most horrible reality in our country's complex, and all too often overlooked, history.

Sent by Amy Clinkscales | 10:13 PM ET | 03-08-2007

I strongly believe that a wide-spread observation of our now politically correct???or suppressed???beliefs would help many people understand where America actually stands about the topic of racism. Racism is a taboo subject. By the white community, the blacks were seen as a lesser, weak race up until the early in the 20th century, and I feel that the racist white men took full advantage of America???s popular beliefs of the time. Though, the main issue may not have been racism at all; the issue may have been the power and control the vicious white men were after. Power and control is a nasty temptation abusers can't resist. In the cases between blacks and white, the white men, who tortured or looked down upon the black community, sought a weaker figure and came down hard, relentlessly. Nonetheless, racism has been seriously addressed and dealt with since serious crime (such as lynching) has been almost entirely abolished. The ban on crimes against blacks could even be a plausible explanation for the rise in domestic violence. Over the past 50 years, domestic violence (or spouse battery) has been on the rise. Because America has openly put forth effort towards ending black and white dispute, racist violence has been ???out of bounds???, to say the least. But having limits is a passive solution to the situation. The white men lost their socially acceptable targets (the "inferiors" of the time--the blacks); at the time, the blacks never had much control over the situation. That lack of control could have easily caused a harsh rebound for the black community, with an self identity starvation and enraged hunger for individuality and control; and still today, both blacks and whites are responsible for the hundreds of thousands of women being battered all over the country. Since racism has been addressed, women's rights have mildly been neglected. Women are now the inferior figures of our time. Women are in the greater majority taking a lot of unnecessary abuse in every community. The topic to address is not racism; the topic to address is abuse. Racism is abuse' scapegoat.

Sent by Jessica Livingston | 4:19 PM ET | 03-09-2007

This was a fascinating and powerful show, and Michel Martin and her guests, Professors Ifill and Polly Stewart, are to be commended for their sheer courageousness in discussing this little-known corner of American history. In the same way that Germans, in the years following Nazism and the Holocaust, had to engage in what they call "Trauerarbeit", that is, the "mourning work" of revisiting the painful past, we, too, as Americans must confront the dark truths about race relations. Otherwise, all of our claims to being a land founded on justice and equality will ring hollow. True freedom is achieved only in facing the truth.

Sent by Pamela A. Lewis | 1:43 PM ET | 03-10-2007

Great show. I liked the juxtiposition of the factual and the fictive. I wish Prof. Stewart had said more about the Eastern Shore lynching and just how it was an outgrowth of strangers not being welcomed there at the time. How does the interaction move from icy stares to hanging a man from the end of a rope?

Do you know about the new book about the "Clotilde," the last schooner carrying blacks from Africa to the States? They arrived five years before the end of the Civil War and after the war created a uniquely African town. That would be interested in hearing about. I can't remember the name. But even Zora Neale Hurston interviewed the descendants for a book that was never published.

Sent by Stanley | 10:24 AM ET | 03-12-2007

Thanks for this. I've linked your discussion on lynching to mine as approached via the recent hanging of Saddam Hussein, http://terryhowcott.com/greenspace.asp?id=498.

I think it is fascinating and also commendable that you broach this subject coming out of the barn.

But, I hope it is indicative of a plan to move with a different sort of journalistic bravery, and that we'll see a Sister in mainstream media making some relative effort to "crossover" in the opposite direction than is commonly perceived as some inherent desire of Black people.

I look forward to observing whether or not that is true. Evidence of such may be made clear very early on by way of whether NPR will make my comment non existent for daring to allude to that very prospect.

Thanks,

Terry Howcott

Sent by Terry Howcott | 12:04 AM ET | 03-15-2007

I was very excited and moved by your "The Power of Memory" show. Thank you! The idea that "reconciliation must be local" is very powerful and rings true. I can't wait to read more. thank you for your ideas!

Sent by Marian Fredal | 1:46 PM ET | 03-19-2007

I agree that the most sickening thing about these lynchings was that children were taken and people treated it as a party. Children and adults were laughing and smiling at the death, the horrible death, of a young person.

Sent by Helen A. Spalding | 5:26 PM ET | 03-26-2007

I think that we really need to understand past events to understand the basis of the stereotypes and racism we have today. For instance, one area I am interested in is the race science that was conducted from about 1900 to 1935. This research was done by anthropologists and psychologists with the purpose of finding racial differences. The majority of the researchers believed in white supremacy and were racists. They used the guise of 'science' to prove that some 'racial' groups were inferior to others. Their research was also used to start eugenics institutes to purify white blood. Although their research is now discredited, it was used by the Nazis, and is still used by hate groups. What the so-called scientists found was published in scientific journals and books, and taught to thousands of psychologists, sociologists, and educators during and after the race science period. So when racists claim that 'black people are stupid' they may be basing it on that old research where psychologists misused IQ tests. The information about this period is left out of history of psychology texts and it is not taught in universities. Science was used to support racism, slavery, and the subjugation of people of colour and women as well.

Sent by BronzeTrinity | 6:28 AM ET | 04-04-2007