Noose’s Revival is Raising the Issue of Intent

By Jake Wagman, St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Jan. 18–ST. LOUIS — It would have been a new low in Fire Department race relations: the apparent mock lynching of a stuffed toy monkey in a city engine house last month.

Black firefighters called it a “terrible act of hate.” Racial tension in the department flared. City Hall requested a federal investigation.

After a two-week inquiry, the FBI concluded that happenstance, not hate, was the leading factor. The monkey, retrieved from a fire scene, had been draped from a coat rack to dry. The noose was actually an equipment strap around its neck. No racial bias was involved, the agency said.

Even so, the incident came amid an increase in noose complaints nationwide, possibly a reaction to the use of a noose in the “Jena 6″ case in Louisiana. Missouri and other states are now considering legislation that targets the hangman’s noose.

But, experts say, such measures can be difficult to enforce and, as the firehouse episode demonstrates, fraught with ambiguities.

“The fact is that many of these things are very close calls,” said Mark Potok, director of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center. “When a noose goes up as part of a Halloween display, is that really racist?”

Potok says the noose, which is seen as an icon of racially-based lynching, has replaced the burning cross as the dominant symbol of racial intimidation in the nation.

The image has even worked its way into the world of golf: A television commentator’s remark that Tiger Woods’ competitors may want to “lynch” him led Golfweek magazine to put a noose on the cover of its current issue.

LINKS TO ‘JENA 6′

The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate crimes nationwide, finds fewer than a dozen noose reports in a typical year. But in the last four months, the center says, there have been between 60 and 70, including incidents at a Home Depot in New Jersey, a factory in Houston and at Columbia University in New York, where a noose was found hanging on the door of an African-American professor’s office.

Many trace the increase to events in Jena, La., where a noose display preceded the beating of a white student by black classmates. The incident led to criminal cases against six black students, which touched off a national outcry.

Though the local U.S. attorney has since said that the noose was not directly related to the altercation, there are calls for the passage of anti-noose laws.

Some, such as Potok, question whether those measures, which hinge on intangibles such as context and intent, can be effective. “I don’t believe for a second that hate crime penalty enhancement laws have reduced hate crime,” Potok said.

Even so, a proposal now in the Missouri Senate would establish criminal penalties for displaying a noose with the “intent to intimidate any person or group.” In New York state, a similar bill would make drawing or painting a noose criminal harassment in some circumstances.

Yet the difference between innocuous action and hateful imagery can often be blurry.

When the toy monkey was discovered, black city firefighters said they did not care that there was no actual rope.

“Whether it’s a rope or a shoe string, it’s a noose around the neck of a monkey,” said Abe Pruitt, a vice chair of the black firefighters’ group.

The FBI declined to pursue hate crime charges after an investigation revealed that the monkey, which had been at the station for weeks, was hung from the coat rack by a firefighter oblivious to the potential interpretation.

“This was an innocent thing,” said John Gillies, head of the local FBI office.

The FBI also looked into a later incident at an engine house across town — where a box of crackers was hung by a cord — but dismissed it as a prank between two minority firefighters.

For many African-Americans, displaying a noose can be the equivalent of a death threat, said Hilary Shelton, a St. Louis native who is head of the NAACP’s Washington bureau.

Though laws that target noose displays and hateful images should consider context and other factors, “ignorance is not a valid excuse,” Shelton said.

In many cases, he said, culprits claim they don’t realize the significance of the image — but only “when they get caught.”

Jeannine Bell, a law professor at Indiana University who has written extensively about hate crimes, says motivation is the key.

“You don’t have a hate crime just because the victim sees something,” Bell said. “You look to the perpetrator’s motivation.”

Regardless if it’s meant as a joke, hanging a noose with the intent to intimidate or frighten can be a hate crime, Bell said.

“Even if they think it’s funny, they are getting a laugh at somebody’s fright,” Bell said.

SHERIFF INCIDENT

That is what allegedly happened at another St. Louis public safety agency, an incident now the focus of a civil lawsuit. In October, two African-American deputies sued the city Sheriff’s Department, claiming the sheriff failed to take proper action after three other deputies hung a noose near a cell in July 2006.

According to a personnel letter from Sheriff Jim Murphy, the three deputies admitted playing “a practical joke” on another deputy by throwing a noose over a pipe to hang the deputy’s chair.

A spokesman for Murphy has called the lawsuit “groundless” and, in court documents, the department denies claims of a racially hostile workplace.

A lawyer for the deputies wonders if the city might have taken a harder stance if hanging a noose was against the law. “I would like to think that if such a law were on the books, the sheriff would have handled this differently,” attorney Jerome Dobson said.

Under the proposed Missouri law, individuals convicted of displaying a noose with the intent to instill fear would be guilty of a misdemeanor the first time and, on subsequent offenses, a felony punishable by up to four years in prison.

The bill’s sponsor, Sen. Yvonne S. Wilson, D-Kansas City, said she proposed the measure to prevent noose incidents like the ones at Jena from spreading to Missouri — which, in the years after the Civil War, was a site of many lynchings.

“History repeats itself,” Wilson said, “and we certainly don’t want to go back to that.”

jwagman@post-dispatch.com — 314-622-3580

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