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.

Apart from that, the book is a good example of the treatment that lasted from 1619 till January 1865 and the passing of the thirteenth amendment. That’s a very long time and that kind of trauma is bound to survive the abolition of slavery for a long time, especially since it will take another full century to finally give the descendants of the Black slaves the right to vote and full protection of the law in 1964–65, and yet the fourteenth amendment gave them the full protection of the law and the fifteenth amendment gave them the right to vote just after the Civil War.

Some practices are die-hard habits with the exploiters of other human beings reduced to chattel.

At least you will understand what Post Traumatic Slavery Disorder or Syndrome is and you might realize that full healing is still not quite reached for some of these descendants of the slaves. By the way, this Post Traumatic Slavery Disorder, or…