America's legacy of lynching is at the root of protests over George Floyd's death
When Heather Coggins saw George Floyd cry out,"Mama!" as a Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck, she thought of her uncle.
Timothy Coggins was stabbed and dragged to his death in a racially fueled killing that wasn't solved for 35 years. His body was found maimed in a field in Sunny Side, Georgia, in 1983. Before that day, the chipper 23-year-old was known as a mama's boy. He wouldn't leave the house without telling his mother, Viola, he loved her and giving her a kiss. He'd get another peck when he got home.
— Eliott C. McLaughlin October 19, 2017 When she first met a CNN reporter about her uncle's case in 2017, she waited to enter a cafe because a circling truck drew her suspicions. She went inside after she was satisfied it posed no threat."Why wouldn't we fear the media or the law enforcement in terms of nobody is protecting us? Nobody wants to hear our story," she said. The philosopherYancy is comfortable with the term, lynching, for hate-driven killings, he said.
Rodney King: The viral video that set a city on fire 03:00Once slavery was abolished, whites sought to control a liberated workforce. Lynchings discouraged social mobility, served as surveillance and instilled fear, forcing blacks to"internalize the ever-present possibility that this could happen for minor infractions," he said. "Lynching functioned as a form of control and as a form of intimidation," he said.
2014: Trayvon's mom: Brown's burial will hurt 04:04"The black body is oversaturated with violence. The wallet phantasmatically becomes a gun," said Yancy, who doesn't jog in white neighborhoods or walk with his cell phone out. Like many killings, Floyd's fits the mold of a lynching, he said. A white man, acting on fear, impulsively and extrajudicially exacted gratuitous violence on a man he deemed a criminal, he said.
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