From 1920 until 1938, a flag on Fifth Avenue in New York City proclaimed an uncomfortable reality to passers-by on New York’s busy streets: “A man was lynched yesterday.”
In the South, where Jim Crow held a vice grip on the government 60 years after the end of the Civil War, masked men regularly kidnapped people who defied white supremacy, brutally murdered them in public, celebrated their extrajudicial execution as a moral victory, then lied about what the victims had actually done.
After this happened to friends of hers in Memphis, Tennessee, Ida B. Wells devoted her life to challenging the lies told about lynching victims by investigating the true reasons for their deaths.
She found the victims of lynchings were never guilty of the crime used to incite the mob. Instead, whether economically or politically, they incited the ire of Jim Crow’s paramilitary forces because they refused to submit to its dehumanizing demands.
For refusing to bow, they were made an example.
On January 24, Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse at the local VA, was lynched by masked men on the streets of Minneapolis, Minnesota. Before they had any time to investigate what had actually happened, the Trump regime smeared Pretti with lies.
Stephen Miller, who has set ICE deportation quotas to counter an imagined invasion of non-white people, called Pretti a “domestic terrorist.” Greg Bovino, who held a press conference as spokesperson for the MAGA regime, accused Pretti of planning to “massacre law enforcement.”
But Pretti was holding a phone, filming masked men who were terrorizing people on his city’s streets. We know this because other courageous neighbors were doing the same thing. One of them captured the celebratory clapping of agents that began as the 10 shots that killed Pretti were still being fired.
The masks. The lies. The celebration. These are the hallmarks of a lynching. They clarify what we are facing.
These are not men who made a mistake. They are not law enforcement officers who need better training. They are executing their mission to force Americans to comply with the Trump regime — and thanks to the Big Deadly and Destructive Bill that passed Congress last summer, they have unprecedented resources to do it.
They only way to stop a lynch mob is to build a moral movement that can reclaim the tools of government, hold people accountable for their crimes, and reconstruct a democracy committed to liberty and equality for all.
Just as American history helps us name what we’re seeing, it can also show us the way out. Jim Crow was defeated in the 20th century by a coalition of people who countered the distorted moral narrative of a fiery cross with a moral movement that demonstrated the power of nonviolence.
Sixty-two years ago, after three civil rights workers were kidnapped and murdered in Mississippi, hundreds of college students were gathered in Ohio for training. When civil rights leader Bob Moses told the group what had happened, every one of those young people decided to risk their lives to continue on with the work of registering voters.
Like them, those of us who know what these masked men are doing is wrong cannot sit back and curse the darkness from the comfort of our normal lives. Instead, we must recognize what’s stirring within us as righteous anger to fuel a moral struggle.
We must let the blood of Alex Pretti and Renee Good and the more than 30 people who have died in ICE custody over the past year cry out from the ground. It is calling us to build a moral movement to reclaim the tools of government in the places where we are.
Alex Pretti was lynched, as Renee Good was before him. In this moment, we must each make our decision about what we will do with the power of nonviolence to reclaim the tools of our government.
