LYNCHING IN AMERICA, DON’T FORGET THIS HUMAN DISASTER

THE WILLIE LYNCH LETTER AND THE MAKING OF A SLAVE — AFRICAN TREE PRESS, LONG ISLAND CITY, NY

This book is not extremely important in its content measured by the number of pages. But it is capital though in its historical role and value. Willie Lynch is the one who came from some English-speaking West Indies to Virginia in 1712 and told, actually taught, the local planters how to traumatize Black slaves into becoming submissive slaves. The technique is simple and horrible: Frighten them s**tless, rip a few apart after tarring them with hot tar, feathering them with chicken feathers and setting them on fire with simple matches, and then let two horses be tied each one, to one leg, and let them be whipped into running in opposite directions. The black rebellious individual, still not yet a slave who will never be a submissive slave, is torn apart like a chicken wishbone. One should be enough… at least for a while. And it is uneconomical to rip apart too many of them.

That Willie Lynch willed his name to the lynching practice. He is a famous person indeed, and his fame will still last some more centuries.