http://www.buzzfeed.com/albertsamah...fun-a-modern-day-lynching-in-missi#.agZ95G00J
Read the full story. It's heartbreaking.
James Bradfield worked the graveyard shift at a factory that built airplane parts in Jackson, Mississippi. It was a new job and he didnt like the hours. Hed previously worked for a company that made radiators, but the company went out of business and Bradfield had to take the next job he could find. And so he was tired on the morning of June 26, 2011, when the detective arrived at his home and told him that Craig Anderson, his partner for 18 years, had died. Hed been hit by a truck, the detective said.
Bradfield, 44 at the time, learned the horrible truth this was no accident. The suspects were teenagers. They were white. They had attacked Anderson because he was black. They had taken pleasure in his suffering. The young man who killed him had celebrated his death. This was not simply a murder. This was a lynching.
The night Craig Anderson was killed, a group teenagers gathered for a birthday party on a farm in the suburbs of Jackson. Soon their names would become infamous, but for now they were merely high school students getting drunk around a bonfire on a warm summer night: Deryl Dedmon, John Aaron Rice, Dylan Butler, Kirk Montgomery, Shelbie Richards, Sarah Graves, John Blalack, Jonathan Gaskamp, Robert Rice, Joseph Dominick.
Late in the night, Dedmon suggested they go into Jackson to fuck up a nigger, Blalack told police. Blalack said that Dedmon seemed bloodthirsty. Dedmon told his friends that a group of black people had stolen his wallet in Jackson the night before, Montgomery told police. Deryl was upset that he had got robbed in Jackson and he was having girl trouble also, Montgomery said. Richards and Graves tried to persuade others to join. Blalack collected empty beer bottles.
They had done this before. At least four times over the previous three months, the teens had terrorized black people in Jackson, a mostly black city they called Jafrica, according to court documents.
They threw bottles at homeless black people they passed, then pulled into the parking lot of a motel just off the highway, where they saw Craig Anderson standing beside an orange Chevy Avalanche. Montgomery told Dedmon to meet them there. Rice and Blalack got out of the car and approached Anderson, and Anderson said that he had locked his keys inside his truck. He asked if they had a coat hanger to open the truck. The teens told police that Anderson appeared drunk and that they continued the conversation to stall him until Dedmon arrived. His truck pulled up a few minutes later. Dedmon stepped out and shouted, Nigger, get away from my truck!
Rice threw the first punch. Anderson fell to the ground. Dedmon jumped on top of him and punched him in the head repeatedly. I did hear Deryl call him a stupid nigger and he was cussing him while he was hitting him, Butler told police. The barrage lasted about a minute or two. When it was over, Dedmon took Andersons wallet, Blalack and Montgomery told police. Then Rice and Dedmon headed back to their vehicles. Dedmon raised a fist and shouted, White power! and somebody in the Jeep responded, White power! Montgomerys Jeep drove off.
When he got back into his truck, Dedmon said, Stupid nigger, according to Graves, and then, just as Dedmon was about to turn onto the road, he stopped. In his headlight beams, Dedmon saw Anderson stumbling to his feet at the edge of the parking lot. Dedmon backed up and angled his truck at Anderson. Then he hit the gas, jumped the curb, and ran him over. As the green truck took off down the road, two witnesses at the motel heard the woman in the passengers seat, Richards, shout Fucking nigger! out the window.
Montgomery said Dedmon called and told him, I ran that nigger over. The two groups reconvened at a McDonalds around the corner. Dedmon had this big smirk on his face, Montgomery said. Dedmon walked around to the front of his truck. He was looking at it, laughing, Butler said.
At least three witnesses had seen the truck hit Anderson. They described the vehicle to police and ran to the victim. One witness, Charlotte Shaw, saw the white Jeep and the green pickup drive past the parking lot on the way back to the highway. Shaw told police, They were pointing and laughing.
The racism present was not the public and proud strain common in Americas past. This was racism clouded by denial and shame. Sarah Graves mother, Mary Miles Harvey, wrote a letter to the court saying that she didnt raise her daughter to be a racist. At Graves sentencing hearing, Judge Harvey Wingate called Harvey to the witness stand to ask her about the letter. He noted that Graves had told investigators that when her and her brothers rooms were messy, Harvey would tell them they were living like niggers. Harvey denied saying that.
I would have said Negroes, not niggers, she said. I just meant that their rooms were nasty, like a pigsty.
Wingate asked her what she thought the word nigger meant.
An ignorant, nasty person, Harvey said. I was taught in school that a nigger was a nasty person, and a Negro was a black person.
In 2010, President Obama appointed him to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi, making him the second black federal judge in the states history. Reeves seat had once been held by Harold Cox, a segregationist who was known to call black people baboons from the bench. Twenty-seven years after Coxs final day in the courtroom, Reeves looked down from that bench at three young white men convicted of lynching a black man.
There is something different about Mississippi, Reeves said, quoting historian Anthony Walton, something almost unspeakably primal and vicious; something savage unleashed there that has yet to come to rest.
He spoke of the states bloody history and read the names of some of those who had been lynched. The lynching of James Anderson, Reeves told the courtroom, ripped off the scab of the healing scars of Mississippi, causing her, our Mississippi, to bleed again.
The sadness of this day also has an element of irony to it, Reeves said. The three white defendants had committed their crimes in a city with a black district attorney and a black mayor; had been escorted into the court by agents who worked for a black U.S. marshal; had been prosecuted by lawyers working for a black U.S. attorney under an office led by a black U.S. attorney general; were being sentenced by a black federal judge; and would be sent into a federal prison system headed by a black director. In order to continue that progress, Reeves suggested to the courtroom, the state had to recognize the blood in its soil.
See, today we take another step away from Mississippis tortured past, Reeves said. We move farther away from the abyss. Indeed, Mississippi is a place and a state of mind. And those who think they know about her people and her past will also understand that her story, our Mississippi story, has not been completely written.
Read the full story. It's heartbreaking.
Typical youths don't fucking decide "hey let's go murder a person." That's not foolishness, foolishness implies that they didn't know what they were doing, fuck off, they're insane, there are about a million sane responses to anyone who says shit like this out loud:
