Lynching in New England

Rope burns on the neck of 8 year old victim

The Washington Post reports today of the attempted lynching of an 8 year old bi-racial boy by a group of children just a few weeks ago in Claremont NH (emphasis mine):

It was around 5 p.m. on a Monday in late August, and an 8-year-old boy, like so many others that summer evening, was playing in a back yard. The others he was with had a few years on him — some were as old as 14 — and he had no reason to suspect that the picnic table or tire swing nearby would become tools for what his family alleges was a racially motivated near-hanging.

That night in Claremont, N.H., took a dark turn, the boy’s family claims, when the teens started taunting the boy with racial epithets and throwing sticks and rocks at his legs. Family accounts of the incident reported by the Valley News allege the teens stood on top of the picnic table and grabbed a rope attached to a tire swing.

“The (teenagers) said, ‘Look at this,’ supposedly putting the rope around their necks,” [The boy’s grandmother, Lorrie Slattery] told the Valley News. “One boy said to (her grandson), ‘Let’s do this,’ and then pushed him off the picnic table and hung him.”
…
Slattery told the Valley News that Aug. 28 wasn’t the first time the teenagers in the neighborhood used racial slurs against her grandson.

“When my sister calls me when something is wrong I feel it in my bones before ever picking up the phone,” the caption read. “Tonight I was spot on,” the uncle wrote in his Facebook post.

There those here at BMG who allege that racism and lynchings aren’t an issue here in New England, that we need only concern ourselves with issues that concern “ordinary” (white) people. Claremont is a short two hour drive away. The perpetrators of this incident are children (the oldest 14).

When we have groups of children attempting to hang a bi-racial 8 year old, we have a problem with racism.

All of us. Right. Here. Right. Now.

Please share widely!

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