Few Answers About Nooses, but Much Talk of Jim Crow

The New York Times
By PAUL VITELLO
BALDWIN, N.Y., Oct. 19 —

All the nooses are different, the police say. Some are coiled six times, some eight. Some are simple knots. The one found here the other day, suspended from a fence in a Highway Department yard, was wrapped with duct tape. All are blunt instruments of racial intimidation because of what they represent.
“They represent terrorizing black people and keeping them in their place,” said Ruth Roberson, a parks employee who is black, pausing on Friday morning while raking leaves. “Now they don’t lynch you. It’s all about jobs.”
At least seven times in the past few weeks, nooses have been anonymously tossed over pipes or hung on doorknobs in the New York metropolitan area — four times here on Long Island, twice in New York City, once at a Home Depot store in Passaic, N.J. The settings are disparate. One noose was hung in a police station locker room in Hempstead, where the apparent target was a black police officer recently promoted to deputy chief. Another was draped over the doorknob of the office of a black professor at Columbia University.
The question of why these things were happening — whether linked to events somewhere else, like in Jena, La., or part of some new homegrown vernacular of race hate — seemed to wait in line last week behind the question of where the next noose would be found.
Three noose episodes took place on Long Island in three days. On Wednesday, two were found at a sanitation garage in the Town of Hempstead — one of them looped around the neck of a stuffed animal with its face blackened. On Thursday, a noose was discovered hanging in a Nassau County highway department yard in Baldwin. On Friday, a worker at the Green Acres shopping mall in Valley Stream found one slung over a door at a construction site.
Public officials said they were outraged, determined to catch the culprits — and stumped.
“It would diminish the seriousness of these events to call any of them copycat situations,” said Kate Murray, the supervisor of the Town of Hempstead, a sprawling township of 750,000 residents, about 15 percent of them black, where all of last week’s incidents occurred. “But I’m not a sociologist. I am surprised by it.”

[To see the entire article, go to: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/21/nyregion/21noose.html?th&emc=th ]