Public hangings are not lynchings and Hyde-Smith's statement, while unwise, was not racist

    Mississippi's newly appointed candidate-Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith is being roundly criticized for a comment caught on video in which she states that her admiration for a supporter is such that she would attend a public hanging for the him if he asked her to.
    The comment is actually complex, but Hyde-Smith is being accused of racism in light of the fact that Mississippi is known for having a high number of lynchings. Of course, by definition a public hanging is considered a governmental execution having nothing to do with lynching, so these criticisms of Hyde-Smith are bogus. Her statement was unwise, but by no means racist.
    The video above shows preparations for a public hanging that was to be held in Wolf City, Wyoming, in 1894. Obviously if a public hanging were tantamount to a lynching Nat King Cole, who just happened to have been black, wouldn't have been so happily singing about the event.
    Until the 1930s public hangings were common throughout the United States, and Mississippi was no different. A botched hanging in 1932 caused public sentiment in Mississippi to turn against hanging, which led to the introduction of the electric chair in 1940 (oddly enough, botched executions today don't cause so much upset). For a number of years Mississippi's electric chair was actually held up nationally as a more humane method of execution, but it was subject to malfunction, causing agonizing death. The electric chair, known as “Ol' Sparky,” was portable since the citizens of Sunflower County didn't want to be known as the Death County, and was used for about a dozen years, from 1940 to 1954, when Gov. Hugh White rammed through a law establishing a gas chamber at Parchman.
    I suspect, based on Cindy Hyde-Smith's statement and my own research that at some point attending a public hanging became something upstanding citizens just did not do. Assuming this is true, her statement makes sense, although I think it's important to note that I think it's a phrase she picked up from a grandparent or grand-uncle or other community members.
    The video of her statement is limited and I can't understand everything she says, but she's just talking informally praising a supporter and says, “If he invited me to a public hanging I'd be on the front row.”
    If you parse her statement out she is saying that few things are more distasteful to her than the thought of attending a public hanging, but she holds her friend in such high regard that if he invited her she would sit on the front row. Her statement is a witticism that most people can simply no longer comprehend. But she's no more supporting lynching than Nat King Cole was in his song.
    The fact is that the overwhelming majority of white people associate hanging and nooses with the Old West and the types of Hanging Days featured in the Nat King Cole video, not with lynching. For blacks the association is obviously different and as a politician Hyde-Smith should have been smart enough to anticipate that.
    My preference in this election was Chris McDaniel. I happen to think Mike Espy is a good man and if elected would be one of the more conservative Democrats in the Senate; but he would still be a Democrat. So I will be voting for Hyde-Smith and hope that she can update her repertoire of Southern aphorisms, although in doing so our language will become less rich and enjoyable.
    In any event, her statement clearly wasn't racist and those who accuse her of racism are engaging in the worst kind of jackassery. Her statement might have been stupid, but racist it was not.