A Man Was Lynched Yesterday

From 1920 until 1938, a flag on Fifth Avenue in New York City proclaimed an uncomfortable reality to passers-by on New York’s busy streets. In the South, where the authoritarian regime of Jim Crow held a vice grip on the government 60 years after the end of the Civil War, masked men regularly kidnapped people who defied white supremacy, brutally murdered them in public, celebrated their extrajudicial execution as a moral victory, then lied about what the victims had actually done. After this happened to friends of hers in Memphis, Tennessee, Ida B. Wells devoted her life to challenging the lies told about lynching victims by investigating the true reasons for their deaths. She found the victims of lynchings were never guilty of the crime used to incite the mob’s righteous anger. Whether economically or politically, they incited the ire of Jim Crow’s paramilitary forces because they refused to submit to its dehumanizing demands.

For refusing to bow, they were made an example.

On Saturday, January 24, Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse at the local VA, was lynched by masked-men on the streets of Minneapolis, Minnesota. Before they had any time to investigate what had actually happened, the Trump regime smeared Pretti with lies. Stephen Miller, who has set ICE deportation quotas to counter an imagined invasion of non-white people, called Pretti a “domestic terrorist.” Greg Bovino, who held a press conference as spokesperson for the MAGA regime, accused Pretti of planning to “massacre law enforcement.”

But Pretti was holding a phone, filming masked men who were terrorizing people on his city’s streets. We know this because other courageous neighbors were doing the same thing. One of them captured the celebratory clapping of agents that began as the ten shots that killed Pretti were still being fired.

Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove 1d They want us to believe that these men felt threatened - that they were assaulted by a man holding a phone who they tackled to the ground before they shot him in the back. But we can see the agent celebrating while the shots are still being fired - clapping like his team has scored a touch down. This is not sell-defense. It’s not even an execution. It is a lynching. 878 467

The masks. The lies. The celebration. These are the hallmarks of a lynching. They clarify what we are facing.

These are not men who made a mistake.

They are not law enforcement officers who need better training.

These are people who have embraced a false moral narrative that tells them they are serving God, their families, and the cause of liberty when they murder a fellow American in the street.

These men will not be shamed into a gentler approach to their mission, nor will they be intimidated by the majority that is against them. However ill prepared they may be, they are executing their mission to force Americans to comply with the Trump regime, and thanks to the Big Deadly and Destructive Bill that passed Congress last summer, they have unprecedented resources to do it.

They only way to stop a lynch mob is to build a moral movement that can reclaim the tools of government, hold people accountable for their crimes, and reconstruct a democracy committed to liberty and equality for all.

Just as American history helps us name what we’re seeing as a lynching, it can also show us the way out. Jim Crow was defeated in the 20th century by a coalition of Black and white people who countered the distorted moral narrative of a fiery cross with a moral movement that demonstrated the power of God through nonviolence. Drawing on the prophet Amos, leaders like Ella Baker and Septima Clark, Dr. King and Fred Shuttlesworth organized a remnant of people who were willing to nonviolently interrupt unjust systems. They petitioned God to send divine assistance for the those who cry out for justice, and then they prayed with their feet. “Go into the streets. Cry out in the marketplaces,” they heard the ancient prophet say. They gave people a moral narrative to participate in that was more true and thus more compelling than the one shaped by Jim Crow’s lies and distortions.

The vast majority of Americans who have seen what is being done by masked-men in their name know that it is wrong. We cannot sit back and curse the darkness from the comfort of our normal lives. Instead, we must recognize what is stirring within us as righteous anger to fuel a moral struggle. At the root of all anger is grief. We must let the blood of Alex Pretti and Renee Good and the more than 30 people who have died in ICE custody over the past year cry out from the ground.

It is calling us to build a moral movement to reclaim the tools of government in the places where we are.

62 years ago, when the civil rights movement lifted a moral narrative that called all Americans to affirm the equal dignity of every person, the distorted moral narrative of Jim Crow compelled officers in Mississippi to kidnap civil rights workers, lynch them under the cover of night, and bury their bodies in a dam. When news broke of the disappearance of James Cheney, Micky Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman, hundreds of college students were still gathered in Ohio for a training session. Bob Moses told the group what had happened and acknowledged that each person had to make their own decision about whether they would go to Mississippi to register voters for the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. They took a break, gathered in small groups, and talked about what they would do.

To a person, those young people decided to risk their lives to reclaim the tools of their government that day. Before their bodies had been found, the blood of Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman cried out from the ground. It told those who were willing to listen that they were engaged in a moral struggle and that they were on the side of truth. It focused them on their task of reconstructing a democracy that recognized the freedom and equality of all people.

Alex Pretti was lynched this weekend, as Renee Good was before him. In this moment, we must each make our decision about what we will do with the power of nonviolence to reclaim the tools of our government. Because we know the power of infrequent voters to change the political calculus in this country, we are committed to reconstructing democracy by loving forward together in North Carolina. By increasing turnout in places that this regime has gerrymandered in order to try to steal House seats, we know that a unprecedented movement vote can make it possible to hold this regime accountable and pursue a moral policy agenda that makes living wages, healthcare, just immigration policy, and peace possible in our time.

This is our commitment: to love forward together. We invite you to learn more about how you can join the effort in North Carolina, help spread the word, or make a donation to support the work here.

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At 1pm ET today, January 26, we’ll be live on Substack with our friend Steve Schmidt and The Save America Movement to launch a new ad about the Love Forward campaign. We hope you’ll join us.