Last week at a House hearing on anti-Asian discrimination, Lone Star State Congressman Chip Roy puffed out his chest and proposed: “There’s old sayings in Texas about, you know, ‘find all the rope in Texas and get a tall oak tree.’ You know, we take justice very seriously, and we ought to do that — round up all the bad guys.”
Ever since hearing that misguided statement, I have been wondering what journalist Ida B. Wells-Barnett might say today if she was to miraculously appear as a witness before the House Judiciary Committee.
Wells-Barnett was born into slavery, advocated against Jim Crow laws and investigated post-Reconstruction Era lynching. Many of her findings can be found in the gut-wrenching 1895 book “The Red Record,” subtitled “Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States.” The book is a thorough investigative report that lays bare, in horrifically graphic detail, the practice of lynching as a tactic to support white supremacy.
In addition to describing cases of lynching in terrifying detail, she cited the hard data about these death sentences without due process. “During the year 1894,” for example, “there were 132 persons executed in the United States by due form of law, while in the same year, 197 persons were put to death by mobs who gave the victims no opportunity to make a lawful defense.”
Despite being called out for his remarks glorifying lynching, Roy remains unapologetic. In fact, the Republican doubled down when he said, “Apparently some folks are freaking out that I used an old expression about finding all the rope in Texas and a tall oak tree about carrying out justice against bad guys. I meant it.”
If Wells-Barnett, who led an anti-lynching crusade in the United States in the 1890s, were to mysteriously appear, she might take Roy to task by reminding him that lynch parties were sadistic events attended by large audiences. The hanging itself might be preceded by torture and followed by setting torsos afire and then excising ears, toes, teeth, fingers and strips of charred skin from the immolated victims, and then distributing them as souvenirs.
I wonder if Roy is aware that photographers were often given a heads-up before a lynching. They would then install portable printing presses to mass produce images of the brutal festivities for onlookers desiring mementos of the occasion.
Some folks pocketed lengths of the kind of rope Rep. Roy referred to; rope that was used to parade victims through the town square like cattle and then hang them. Others collected strands of victims’ hair and framed them under glass as keepsakes and, I imagine, conversation pieces for when company came a calling.
In the 2020 book “Caste: The Origins of our Discontents,” author Isabel Wilkerson reported that a lynching party bystander from Waco, Texas, no doubt a spiritual ancestor of Rep. Roy, wrote on the back of a postcard that he mailed to his folks, “This is the Barbecue we had last night. My picture is to the left…your son, Joe.” Lynching postcards were so popular at the turn-of-the-twentieth-century, Wilkerson reported, that they became a growing part of the postcard industry, until they were banned by the U.S Postmaster General around 1908, which of course didn’t prevent anyone from placing them in envelopes for mailing.
Perhaps not so coincidentally, Texas tough-guy Chip Roy conjured the image of a rope and a tall oak tree only days after Sen. Ron Johnson, a Republican from Wisconsin, affirmed his belief in the Jan. 6 domestic terrorists’ “love of country” and “respect for law enforcement.”
Disturbingly, increasing numbers of elected representatives seem to be cut from the same cloth as Johnson and Roy and are actively involved in scaling back voting rights. If they succeed, it will be another step toward their goal of making America Jim Crow again.
Andrew Malekoff
