Noose Madness!

First we had the complaints about the hanging witch, and now another home's Halloween decorations come under attack because a dreaded noose was involved:

Chesla Flood couldn't believe her eyes. A hangman's noose circled the neck of a black-hooded, jeans-clad dummy suspended from the chimney of a house in Madison.

Flood called her mother, Millie Hazlewood, who reported the Halloween display to police. She wasn't the only one. Police went to the property at least

At 8 last night, the family relented, saying they feared for their safety.

"It's no more like freedom of speech anymore," Cheryl Maines said. "My son had to take this down because these people have blown this thing out of proportion."

Before the figure was removed yesterday, Madison Mayor Ellwood "Woody" Kerkeslager said "the appearance and the suggestion (of racism) is there, and it's inappropriate."

At least four recent noose displays -- one each in Jena, La., and Philadelphia and two in New York City -- are drawing renewed attention to a potent symbol of racism, lynchings and the era of Jim Crow segregation.

Unlike those incidents, the Madison figure was part of a Halloween display, and for two days, homeowners Cheryl and David Maines, the borough's superintendent of public works, refused to budge. They said they had done nothing wrong.

Meanwhile, the state chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People denounced the display as offensive, racist and insensitive.

Maybe the perpetually offended folks at the NAACP should read Clarence Page's piece today which gives the noose a little perspective:

Many of us black Americans look through the prism of historical experience and see old-style Southern injustice against blacks, symbolized by the nooses. A series of racially charged incidents in Jena led to charges of attempted murder, that were later reduced, against six black high school students who beat up a white student. Black students reportedly said the white youth had made racial taunts. Many whites hear about the beaten white youth and, regardless of whatever else contributed to local racial tensions, they see an old-style black-on-white hate crime.

But much work has yet to be done that cannot be accomplished with civil rights marches. The return of the noose to public view and national news should remind us, for example, of what a relic the old knotted rope has become.

Today's young black males kill more young black males in a year than the Ku Klux Klan killed in its entire history.

Between 1882 and 1968, historians have documented more than 4,700 lynchings of African Americans, mostly in the South. In 2005, the latest full year of FBI statistics, almost 8,000 black Americans were murdered, mostly by other black Americans.

It is an ironic sign of progress that the white knuckleheads who made history by making nooses have been driven into the shadows. They hang nooses, then run and hide. The terror inflicted by our black knuckleheads stays with us.

As I said previously, the noose has become the must-have civil rights fashion accessory for 2007. Getting irate over Halloween decorations does nothing to elevate the discussion of civil rights in America today.