Jason Morgan Ward, Professor of History, recently wrote an opinion piece for CNN.com, titled “The horrendous message behind Trump’s ‘lynching’ tweet.” The article offers critical perspective on a recent Trump tweet that compared the House’s impeachment inquiry to lynching. Ward discusses actual historical lynchings along with politicians before Trump who have appropriated the rhetoric of lynching for their own (most often demagogic) ends. Ward is, most recently, the author of Hanging Bridge: Racial Violence and America’s Civil Rights Century (Oxford University Press, 2016). Read an excerpt from the CNN.com piece along with the full article: “The horrendous message behind Trump’s ‘lynching’ tweet.”

“By co-opting the word “lynching” to mean anything unpleasant or objectionable, and deploying the term for political expediency or more dangerous ends, the speaker, writer, or, in this case, the tweeter, diminishes lynching’s power in American history.

Worse still, claiming the identity of a lynching victim is an outrageous distraction from and diminishment of the suffering of the many thousands who died at the hands of bloodthirsty mobs—spurred, in many cases, by the racial demagogues of that day. We honor their memory by saying their names; we debase their brutal, shameful treatment by claiming to be them to glibly score rhetorical points.”