Shaun King: Death of Laquan McDonald at the hands of Chicago Officer Jason Van Dyke is modern day lynching

I believe in good and evil. I've seen and studied enough of both to know that they are very real.

I believe in good and evil. I've seen and studied enough of both to know that they are very real. Sadly, as a historian, when I survey the chronology of time, it does not appear that evil ever dies, it just shape shifts, finds new human hosts, and expresses itself in different ways.

During American slavery, we have very few records of the lynchings of African-Americans. While books like Slave Testimony no doubt communicate the levels of barbarous torture often visited upon black bodies during this time, in the end, Africans in America were seen as valuable After the legal end of American slavery, this peculiar profit motive to protect black bodies came to an abrupt halt. Consequently, it gave birth to a horrendous period of lynching.


Forgive me for being graphic, but lynching, while we most regularly associate it with hanging, is more than that. Lynching, from 1865-1965, was hanging, but African-Americans, without any due course of law, were brutally murdered in at least a dozen different heinous ways in this country. Our proclivity was to believe that lynching died, and in one form, it pretty much did.

Rare are the instances in which black bodies are randomly snatched from homes or jobs or street corners by racist mobs for the sole purpose of torture. While the 1998 lynching of James Byrd in Jasper, Texas where he was chained and dragged from a pickup truck until his body broke into pieces was a bit of a flashback to a previous era, do not believe the lie that lynching has disappeared. Just as the mass extermination of human beings found its way from Germany to Rwanda, lynching, with a slightly different shape, is alive and well today.

Officer Van Dyke has been charged with first degree murder.
Officer Van Dyke has been charged with first degree murder.

Laquan McDonald, a Chicago teenager who appears to have needed some type of medical intervention, was instead met by an officer, Jason Van Dyke, who had no love in his heart. Within six seconds of seeing Laquan McDonald, in spite of the reality that Laquan was walking away and he was following after Laquan, Officer Van Dyke appeared absolutely determined to execute Laquan. He fired every single bullet from his pistol at Laquan, according to court documents.

After Laquan's body was full of bullets, and he was twitching on the ground, Officer Van Dyke continued to fire another shot after another shot after shot after another shot until Laquan was hit a horrific 16 times by the officer. His body was not dangling from a poplar tree, but it was indeed strange fruit.

No judge, no jury, just an executioner.

To be clear, this was no aberration. This was no exception to the rule. This was no freak occurrence. In America, our police are shooting and killing more unarmed African-Americans than we have seen in any year of lynching since 1922.

Sixty years ago, in 1955, at the start of the Civil Rights Movement, three documented cases of black folk being lynched exist. I've taken time to study that number and it may actually be four or five people, but it's not much more. As of today, we know that at least 31 unarmed African-Americans were shot and killed by police. Those numbers don't even include men like Freddie Gray or women like Natasha McKenna who each were unarmed and died cruel deaths at the hands of police but weren't shot. To be honest, we aren't even clear on how many unarmed African-Americans have been killed by police this year.

What we do know is that killing of unarmed African-Americans at the hands of police has replaced lynching in 2015.

It's as awful as it ever was and justice is as rare as ever.