When I think of people standing in the doorway, my mind immediately flashes back to Gov. George C. Wallace, who in 1963 sought to prevent the desegregation of the University of Alabama by “standing in the schoolhouse door.” For some odd reason, when Senator Zell Miller of Georgia thinks of someone blocking the doors of opportunity, he thinks of those who oppose the nomination of Janice Rogers Brown to the federal appeals court in Washington, D.C.

“The Democrats in this chamber refuse to stand and let her do it,” he said. “They’re standing in the doorway, and they’ve got a sign: Conservative African-American women need not apply.”

That would have been bad enough, but Miller didn’t stop there.

“And if you have the temerity to do so your reputation will be shattered and your dignity will be shredded. Gal, you will be lynched.”

Lynched?

Opposing that “gal” is hardly tantamount to a lynching, a sadistic extralegal aspect of Jim Crow that was popular in the late 1880s and early 1900s. And given the popularity of such mob violence in Georgia, Miller should be one of the last people to trivialize lynchings that took the lives of more than 3,000 African-Americans. A book by Ralph Ginzburg, “100 Years of Lynchings,” cites the following newspaper accounts of incidents in Georgia during that period:

NEWMAN, Ga., Apr. 23 – Sam Holt, the murderer of Alfred Cranford and the ravisher of the latter’s wife, was burned at the stake, near Newman, Ga., this afternoon, in the presence of 2000 people. The black man was first tortured before being covered with oil and burned…Before the torch was applied to the pyre, the negro was deprived of his ears, fingers and genital parts of his body. ..Before the body was cool, it was cut to pieces, the bones were crushed into small bits, and even the tree upon which the wretch met his fate was torn up and disposed of as ‘souvenirs.’ The negro’s heart was cut into several pieces, as was also his liver. Those unable to obtain ghastly relics direct paid their more fortunate possessors extravagant sums for them…
[Springfield (Mass.) Weekly Republican, April 28, 1899]

GROVETON, Ga., May 7 – Charlie Jones, a negro, was taken from two officers near here late last night by a number of white men and lynched. It is said that Jones was suspected of having shop lifted a pair of shoes. [Montgomery Advertiser, May 8, 1914]

EASTMAN, Ga., Aug. 29 – A mob of white residents attacked Eli Cooper, a leader among the negroes, as he was in a church at Ocmulgee, Ga., and shot him to death yesterday. The mob then burned the church. Later other negro churches and a lodge were burned. The attack on Cooper grew out of the rumor that the negroes were planning to rise and exterminate the white residents of the section.
[New York Sun, August 29, 1919]

AMERICUS, Ga., Oct. 3 – The body of Ernest Glenwood, a negro, was found yesterday in Flint river near the line of Sumter and Dooly counties by Tom Shirer, a fisherman. The negro, who formerly lived in the vicinity of Lily, Dooly county, disappeared September 22, when he was taken in custody by three masked men. Glen, it is charged, had been circulating incendiary propaganda among negroes in Dooly county….
[Atlanta Constitution October 4, 1919]

QUITMAN, Ga., Oct. 1 – Ray Newsome, a negro, was taken from the H.A. Woods farm near Pinetta, Fla. late today and shot to death as he was either turned loose or escaped from the car. He was accused of insulting a white girl.
[Atlanta Constitution October 2, 1921]

Sadly, Senator Miller isn’t the only conservative to use the lynching analogy to attack political opponents. Orrin Hatch, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has referred to the rejection of Right-wing judges as a lynching. Thomas Sowell, a Black conservative, wrote in two recent columns that those opposing Brown constituted a lynch mob.

And who could ever forget Clarence Thomas referring to his Senate confirmation hearing as a “high-tech lynching.” Never mind that it wasn’t all that long ago that Thomas would have been victim of an old-fashioned lynching had he returned to Pinpoint, Ga. with his White wife. It wasn’t until 1967, in “Loving v. Virginia,” that the U.S. Supreme Court sanctioned interracial marriages.

Lynchings characterized a shameful period of American history. Neither Zell Miller nor any of his Right-wing cronies should casually misuse that word simply because they cannot impose their political will on those who rightly reject judicial zealots.