Newt Gingrich sees lynch mobs
Words matter, Newt, you dried-out old bloviator.
This weekend, former Speaker of the House and author of the Contract On America (thank you, Frank Zappa, for that renaming) Newt Gingrich tweeted:
Let us put aside for a moment that both Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Maxine Waters won their respective elections with roughly 72% of the votes in their districts, while the WhiteSupremacistQAnonGunHumping member of the U.S. House of Representatives won her election by WHO CARES? Her Democratic opponent dropped out, so Newt’s quoting numbers as he did is misleading to the extreme.
But we’ve come to expect that. What I’d like to discuss is Gingrich’s cavalier use of the phrase “lynch mob.” As a self-styled historian, Gingrich should understand the awful national weight of that phrase, and how its misuse can be hurtful.
Gingrich spent his early years in and around Harrisburg, Penn. Just an hour away in the steel mill town of Coatesville, in 1911 a white mob beat and burned alive Zachariah Walker, a Black man who protested his innocence throughout his own murder, and even once escaped the fire, only to be dragged back. The 15 Pennsylvanians arrested in connection to his murder were all acquitted. In disgust, former. Pres. Theodore Roosevelt wrote an editorial that said, in part:
Dreadful though it is for the mob spirit to be roused in a community by such a crime, it would be an even worse calamity if the community did not feel the fury of indignation which produces the mob spirit…
I grew up in Southwest Missouri, which means I come from a state that had the second highest number of lynchings (second only to Oklahoma) outside of the Deep South. Not long ago, a high school buddy (thanks, Stan) recommended the book, “White Man’s Heaven: The Lynching and Expulsion of Blacks in the Southern Ozarks, 1894-1909,” and the book shook me to my core. I always knew my hometown was a sundown town. I also knew I grew up in an almost entirely-white town (and casually wondered why, but not enough to actually ask any one).
Eight years before Zachariah Walker was killed by a white mob in Pennsylvania, a Joplin, Mo., police officer was shot while trying to roust some indigent Black men from the local rail yards. Based on his proximity to the crime, Thomas Gilyard, 20, was arrested for the crime and placed in jail. He never got a trial. A white mob broke in, dragged Gilyard out, and hanged him at the corner of Second and Wall in broad daylight. Then the mob headed toward the part of town where most of Joplin’s Black residents lived. They destroyed homes and businesses, and terrorized families, many of whom left Joplin forever.
In Missouri, at least, the lynchings, the white mob riots, and the running-out-of-towns changed the landscape forever. A few years ago, Joplin residents held a memorial for Gilyard. One of the event’s organizers said:
“We just want to do a collective owning of that sin, that injustice that was done. Without owning a sin, you can’t repent of it, you can’t have reconciliation.”
A Pennsylvania lawmaker is pushing a bill to rename a Coatesville road after Walker.
These are the voices of people who take seriously the awful reality of lynching. Maybe the rest of us should find a new word when we’re describing public disagreements. By now, we really should know better.
When history takes the long view back at this time, it will see Mr. Gingrich as the animating figure in the GOP's turn towards hate and deception. As always, we are responsible for what we create. In the story of Dr. Frankenstein, the monster destroys its creator. Mr. Gingrich is the chief mad-scientist of the monstrous energies destroying an American political party.
I've been reading The Warmth of Other Suns, by Isabel Wilkerson. I have to stop from time to time and read something else to clear my brain. The hate and abuse that white people heaped onto their neighbors was unrelenting. (Still is, but now it takes 21st-century forms like voter suppression and redlining and for-profit prisons.)