Effigies of Black Men and Women Found Hanging on UC Berkeley Campus
The cardboard photos of a black man and woman lynched by angry mobs more than a century ago were discovered hanging by a noose on the Berkeley campus at the University of California as demonstrations against police brutality took place across the U.S.
BY NICOLE HENSLEY
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Saturday, December 13, 2014, 7:00 PM
Protesters marched through the University of California at Berkeley campus on Wednesday
Amid national protests decrying police brutality, three effigies of black people were discovered hanging by a noose on the Berkeley campus at the University of California.
Police and students took the cardboard cutouts depicting lynching victims down Saturday afternoon from two locations on campus as demonstrations broke out to the theme of "#blacklivesmatter."
“We’re uncertain of the intention of this. It could be related to the protests, but it could be racially motivated,” Claire Holmes told the Daily News. “We’d like to get to the bottom of it.”
The disturbing figures hanging from iconic landmarks on the Berkeley campus were reported to police just after 9 a.m., but a third effigy found through social media disappeared before police got to it.
Two of the photo effigies were labeled “I can’t breathe,” Eric Garner’s last words as NYPD Officer Daniel Pantaleo put him in a fatal chokehold.
One of the effigies represented Laura Nelson, a black woman lynched in Oklahoma with her son, Lawrence, on May 25, 1911. Their bodies are shown hanging from this bridge as the mob poses from above.
Her effigy was found hanging from a tree.
Century-old wire reports show their bodies were discovered hanging from a bridge six miles away from their jail cell after a mob broke in, gagged its jailer and kidnapped the Nelsons.
The figure found tied to Sather Gate shows George Meadows, a 22-year-old black man who proclaimed his innocence while being accused of murder and rape in Alabama, according to an 1889 report by Birmingham’s Weekly Herald.
A crowd of about 500 men then took Meadows from the jail to Pratt Mines near Birmingham where they “suspended him from a limb” and “riddled” his body with bullets, the report states.
Neither students nor police were sure who's responsible for hanging the life-size images, but hope “it’s someone who wanted to bring attention to the issue,” UC Berkeley student, Spencer Pritchard, 21, said.
Campus police are investigating the display as a hate crime, Holmes added, but as of Saturday night no one has come forward with any tips.
Photos of a stuffed dummy hanging by a noose along the school’s greek row were also shared on social media, but Holmes said that was from a prior incident during an unspecified Halloween.
Lynching effigies hung at UC Berkeley, quickly taken down
By Greta Kaul
Saturday, December 13, 2014
UC Berkeley students found enlarged photos of lynched African Americans hanging from the university’s famed Sather Gate and a tree near campus Saturday morning.
Michael McBride, pastor of The Way Christian Center in Berkeley, tweeted a photo of one of the cutouts hanging from the gate after a Cal student in his congregation sent it to him. McBride said there were three cutouts and that police officers took two them down soon after the student learned of them. Students took the third.
“I came down and huddled with the students and attempted to help talk them through what they were experiencing, considering the options of it being an art protest, considering the options that it was of malicious intent,” McBride said. “I don’t know what the intention is or was because of the anonymity associated with it.”
The cutouts had the names of lynching victims and the dates of their deaths, along with #ICantBreathe, a slogan of protests over recent grand jury decisions not to indict officers in the Michael Brown and Eric Garner cases.
Effigies in nooses hung from Sather Gate at UC Berkeley before Black Lives Matter protest march
December 13, 2014 11:54 am
by Berkeleyside Editors
An effigy was one of three authorities say was hung at the UC Berkeley campus Saturday morning, Dec. 13, 2014. Photo: Ronnie Mackey Jr.
By Frances Dinkelspiel and Emilie Raguso
2:15 p.m. Pastor Michael McBride, who received tweeted photos of the effigies Saturday morning, said “the anonymity connected to that expression, whether it was by antagonists or allies, contributes to the racial terror that black people have to face in the country. We find it radically insensitive at best and a re-inscription of racial terror … and we need everybody to join with us to say #BlackLivesMatter.” Listen to his interview with Berkeleyside reporter Natalie Orenstein below. (Caution: He was marching and not all of it is easy to hear.)
1:40 p.m. It appears as if one of the effigies hung from Sather Gate is a replica of a famous photo of a young man who was lynched in 1911.
Follow live tweets from Berkeleyside about Saturday’s protest, as well as past coverage.
Scroll down for details of that incident, information from police about what took place on campus Saturday, and an interview with a UC Berkeley professor who is an expert on the psychology of race relations.
1:30 p.m. One of the effigies is a cardboard cutout of a woman with “#I Can’t Breathe,” and “Laura Nelson 1911” written on it. Nelson and her son, L.D. Nelson, were lynched on May 25, 1911, in Oklahoma, according to Wikipedia.
The lynchings happened after the deputy sheriff and three others arrived at the Nelson home on May 2 to investigate the theft of a cow. L.D. Nelson shot and killed the deputy sheriff, and he and Laura Nelson, who had also touched the gun, were charged with murder.
“At around midnight on May 24, Laura and L.D. Nelson were both kidnapped from their cells by a group of between a dozen and 40 men,” according to Wikipedia.
“Sightseers gathered on the bridge the following morning and photographs of the hanging bodies were sold as postcards; the one of Laura is the only known surviving photograph of a female lynching victim. No one was ever charged with the murders; the district judge convened a grand jury, but the killers were never identified.”
1:10 p.m. Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton, a UC Berkeley professor and national expert on intergroup relations — particularly related to race — said Saturday afternoon that he had been upset to learn about the effigies on campus earlier in the day.
“Whether it’s commentary or provocation, it’s atrocious,” he said. “It’s just mean, period. And heartless. And whoever did that simply needs to grow up.”
Mendoza-Denton said it’s difficult to know exactly how to interpret the effigies, whether as a “thoughtless joke” or “straight-up inflammatory racist behavior.”
“It falls somewhere along the line between prank and consciously racist messaging,” he said. “But it doesn’t matter. It’s absolutely thoughtless and wrong. Given the volatility of the situation, it’s just damaging to everybody. It’s a very public and clear example that racism exists at all levels of society, and it’s precisely the kind of symbol that protesters are protesting against.”
Mendoza-Denton said he has been keeping a close eye on this past week’s protests in Berkeley, and had been sad to see all the broken windows in businesses downtown as he drove through the area Saturday. He said he does not support the violence but, “at the same time, there’s a lot of pent-up frustration and anger.”
Mendoza-Denton said, beyond the protests, the community needs a forum to come together for healing and communication. A week and a half ago, the UC Berkeley Black Student Union held one such event on campus, and Berkeley High students along with REALM Charter School students staged a walkout and rally, that culminated with a “die-in” on the UC Berkeley campus several days ago.
Mendoza-Denton said there have been a number of informal forums, but that nothing large-scale has been planned by the university to his knowledge.
“We need to come together to heal,” he said. “There are a lot of different factions, a lot of different voices, and not a lot of control over the messaging one way or another. We need a forum to help us process these very emotionally laden, very relevant evants. But that has to be a two-way street. It has to be a dialogue. And there’s got to be goodwill. And effigies are the very antithesis of that.”
12:26 p.m. UC Berkeley spokeswoman Claire Holmes called Berkeleyside back to clarify some information.
She said University of California Police Department officers found two effigies hanging from Sather Gate on Saturday.
They also saw a photo of a third effigy in an area they think was the Campanile. When police went to remove it, they could not find it, said Holmes. Police believe that someone else took it down.
One of the effigies hanging from Sather Gate had “Can’t Breathe,” written on it. Eric Garner kept saying that when Staten Island police held him in a chokehold.
The effigies were life-sized, she said. They were made from paper stuffed into clothing cardboard cut outs, she said.
UC Berkeley Police received its first call about the matter at 9:10 a.m., she said.
Update 12:07 p.m. UC police found three effigies hanging from a noose on the UC Berkeley campus this morning, according to Claire Holmes, a university spokeswoman. There was some writing on the effigies, including “Put Your Hands Up,” she said.
The effigies were found at Sather Gate and around the campanile, she said. No suspects have been detained.
“It’s unclear what the intent was,,” said Holmes. “It could be that these are related to police violence and the protests that are going on in Ferguson. It could be racially motivated as well.”
Police are combing the campus to see if there are any others, said Holmes.
Original story, 11:54 a.m. UC Berkeley police have confirmed that someone strung up an effigy from Sather Gate around 9 a.m., three hours before a #BlackLivesMatter march was scheduled to begin. It has been taken down. Berkeleyside will update this story as more information becomes available.
Lynching effigies hung at UC Berkeley, quickly taken down
By Greta KaulDecember 13, 2014
December 13, 2014 5:11pm
Michael McBride, pastor of The Way Christian Center in Berkeley, tweeted a photo of one of the cutouts hanging from the gate after a Cal student in his congregation sent it to him. McBride said there were three cutouts and that police officers took two them down soon after the student learned of them. Students took the third.
“I came down and huddled with the students and attempted to help talk them through what they were experiencing, considering the options of it being an art protest, considering the options that it was of malicious intent,” McBride said. “I don’t know what the intention is or was because of the anonymity associated with it.”
The cutouts had the names of lynching victims and the dates of their deaths, along with #ICantBreathe, a slogan of protests over recent grand jury decisions not to indict officers in the Michael Brown and Eric Garner cases.
UC Berkeley spokeswoman Claire Holmes said police were investigating the incident but had not determined who put the images.
“This is definitely something of concern,” Holmes said. “We’re not sure what the motivation was.” The display appeared to be protesting violence against African Americans, but the actual intent was not made clear.
One cutout depicted Laura Nelson, an eastern Oklahoma woman who was raped and hung from a bridge alongside her son in 1911 after he was accused of shooting a sheriff, according to a 2000 article in the Los Angeles Times.
“We find them to be pointed to the larger concern and struggle that we have — that our bodies are seemingly vulnerable and that there is not equal protection under the law that we are afforded safety from both psychology and physical terror,” McBride said.
Leigh Raiford, an associate professor of African American studies at UC Berkeley, saw the photos on Twitter.
“To me this suggested a really powerful public art installation that was trying to provoke people to make historical connection between the history of lynching, state violence against black folks and the contemporary situation that we’re faced with around police brutality and these non-indictments,” Raiford said.
She tweeted several pieces of protest art that repurposed lynching photos, drawing comparisons.
Chronicle Staff Writer Kevin Fagan contributed to this report.
Greta Kaul is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: gkaul@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @gretakaul
 |
| Laura Nelson was lynched in Oklahoma in 1911. |
BY NICOLE HENSLEY
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Saturday, December 13, 2014, 7:00 PM
Protesters marched through the University of California at Berkeley campus on Wednesday
Amid national protests decrying police brutality, three effigies of black people were discovered hanging by a noose on the Berkeley campus at the University of California.
Police and students took the cardboard cutouts depicting lynching victims down Saturday afternoon from two locations on campus as demonstrations broke out to the theme of "#blacklivesmatter."
“We’re uncertain of the intention of this. It could be related to the protests, but it could be racially motivated,” Claire Holmes told the Daily News. “We’d like to get to the bottom of it.”
The disturbing figures hanging from iconic landmarks on the Berkeley campus were reported to police just after 9 a.m., but a third effigy found through social media disappeared before police got to it.
Two of the photo effigies were labeled “I can’t breathe,” Eric Garner’s last words as NYPD Officer Daniel Pantaleo put him in a fatal chokehold.
One of the effigies represented Laura Nelson, a black woman lynched in Oklahoma with her son, Lawrence, on May 25, 1911. Their bodies are shown hanging from this bridge as the mob poses from above.
Her effigy was found hanging from a tree.
Century-old wire reports show their bodies were discovered hanging from a bridge six miles away from their jail cell after a mob broke in, gagged its jailer and kidnapped the Nelsons.
The figure found tied to Sather Gate shows George Meadows, a 22-year-old black man who proclaimed his innocence while being accused of murder and rape in Alabama, according to an 1889 report by Birmingham’s Weekly Herald.
A crowd of about 500 men then took Meadows from the jail to Pratt Mines near Birmingham where they “suspended him from a limb” and “riddled” his body with bullets, the report states.
Neither students nor police were sure who's responsible for hanging the life-size images, but hope “it’s someone who wanted to bring attention to the issue,” UC Berkeley student, Spencer Pritchard, 21, said.
Campus police are investigating the display as a hate crime, Holmes added, but as of Saturday night no one has come forward with any tips.
Photos of a stuffed dummy hanging by a noose along the school’s greek row were also shared on social media, but Holmes said that was from a prior incident during an unspecified Halloween.
Lynching effigies hung at UC Berkeley, quickly taken down
By Greta Kaul
Saturday, December 13, 2014
UC Berkeley students found enlarged photos of lynched African Americans hanging from the university’s famed Sather Gate and a tree near campus Saturday morning.
Michael McBride, pastor of The Way Christian Center in Berkeley, tweeted a photo of one of the cutouts hanging from the gate after a Cal student in his congregation sent it to him. McBride said there were three cutouts and that police officers took two them down soon after the student learned of them. Students took the third.
“I came down and huddled with the students and attempted to help talk them through what they were experiencing, considering the options of it being an art protest, considering the options that it was of malicious intent,” McBride said. “I don’t know what the intention is or was because of the anonymity associated with it.”
The cutouts had the names of lynching victims and the dates of their deaths, along with #ICantBreathe, a slogan of protests over recent grand jury decisions not to indict officers in the Michael Brown and Eric Garner cases.
Effigies in nooses hung from Sather Gate at UC Berkeley before Black Lives Matter protest march
December 13, 2014 11:54 am
by Berkeleyside Editors
An effigy was one of three authorities say was hung at the UC Berkeley campus Saturday morning, Dec. 13, 2014. Photo: Ronnie Mackey Jr.
By Frances Dinkelspiel and Emilie Raguso
2:15 p.m. Pastor Michael McBride, who received tweeted photos of the effigies Saturday morning, said “the anonymity connected to that expression, whether it was by antagonists or allies, contributes to the racial terror that black people have to face in the country. We find it radically insensitive at best and a re-inscription of racial terror … and we need everybody to join with us to say #BlackLivesMatter.” Listen to his interview with Berkeleyside reporter Natalie Orenstein below. (Caution: He was marching and not all of it is easy to hear.)
1:40 p.m. It appears as if one of the effigies hung from Sather Gate is a replica of a famous photo of a young man who was lynched in 1911.
Follow live tweets from Berkeleyside about Saturday’s protest, as well as past coverage.
Scroll down for details of that incident, information from police about what took place on campus Saturday, and an interview with a UC Berkeley professor who is an expert on the psychology of race relations.
1:30 p.m. One of the effigies is a cardboard cutout of a woman with “#I Can’t Breathe,” and “Laura Nelson 1911” written on it. Nelson and her son, L.D. Nelson, were lynched on May 25, 1911, in Oklahoma, according to Wikipedia.
The lynchings happened after the deputy sheriff and three others arrived at the Nelson home on May 2 to investigate the theft of a cow. L.D. Nelson shot and killed the deputy sheriff, and he and Laura Nelson, who had also touched the gun, were charged with murder.
“At around midnight on May 24, Laura and L.D. Nelson were both kidnapped from their cells by a group of between a dozen and 40 men,” according to Wikipedia.
“Sightseers gathered on the bridge the following morning and photographs of the hanging bodies were sold as postcards; the one of Laura is the only known surviving photograph of a female lynching victim. No one was ever charged with the murders; the district judge convened a grand jury, but the killers were never identified.”
1:10 p.m. Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton, a UC Berkeley professor and national expert on intergroup relations — particularly related to race — said Saturday afternoon that he had been upset to learn about the effigies on campus earlier in the day.
“Whether it’s commentary or provocation, it’s atrocious,” he said. “It’s just mean, period. And heartless. And whoever did that simply needs to grow up.”
Mendoza-Denton said it’s difficult to know exactly how to interpret the effigies, whether as a “thoughtless joke” or “straight-up inflammatory racist behavior.”
“It falls somewhere along the line between prank and consciously racist messaging,” he said. “But it doesn’t matter. It’s absolutely thoughtless and wrong. Given the volatility of the situation, it’s just damaging to everybody. It’s a very public and clear example that racism exists at all levels of society, and it’s precisely the kind of symbol that protesters are protesting against.”
Mendoza-Denton said he has been keeping a close eye on this past week’s protests in Berkeley, and had been sad to see all the broken windows in businesses downtown as he drove through the area Saturday. He said he does not support the violence but, “at the same time, there’s a lot of pent-up frustration and anger.”
Mendoza-Denton said, beyond the protests, the community needs a forum to come together for healing and communication. A week and a half ago, the UC Berkeley Black Student Union held one such event on campus, and Berkeley High students along with REALM Charter School students staged a walkout and rally, that culminated with a “die-in” on the UC Berkeley campus several days ago.
Mendoza-Denton said there have been a number of informal forums, but that nothing large-scale has been planned by the university to his knowledge.
“We need to come together to heal,” he said. “There are a lot of different factions, a lot of different voices, and not a lot of control over the messaging one way or another. We need a forum to help us process these very emotionally laden, very relevant evants. But that has to be a two-way street. It has to be a dialogue. And there’s got to be goodwill. And effigies are the very antithesis of that.”
12:26 p.m. UC Berkeley spokeswoman Claire Holmes called Berkeleyside back to clarify some information.
She said University of California Police Department officers found two effigies hanging from Sather Gate on Saturday.
They also saw a photo of a third effigy in an area they think was the Campanile. When police went to remove it, they could not find it, said Holmes. Police believe that someone else took it down.
One of the effigies hanging from Sather Gate had “Can’t Breathe,” written on it. Eric Garner kept saying that when Staten Island police held him in a chokehold.
The effigies were life-sized, she said. They were made from paper stuffed into clothing cardboard cut outs, she said.
UC Berkeley Police received its first call about the matter at 9:10 a.m., she said.
Update 12:07 p.m. UC police found three effigies hanging from a noose on the UC Berkeley campus this morning, according to Claire Holmes, a university spokeswoman. There was some writing on the effigies, including “Put Your Hands Up,” she said.
The effigies were found at Sather Gate and around the campanile, she said. No suspects have been detained.
“It’s unclear what the intent was,,” said Holmes. “It could be that these are related to police violence and the protests that are going on in Ferguson. It could be racially motivated as well.”
Police are combing the campus to see if there are any others, said Holmes.
Original story, 11:54 a.m. UC Berkeley police have confirmed that someone strung up an effigy from Sather Gate around 9 a.m., three hours before a #BlackLivesMatter march was scheduled to begin. It has been taken down. Berkeleyside will update this story as more information becomes available.
Lynching effigies hung at UC Berkeley, quickly taken down
By Greta KaulDecember 13, 2014
December 13, 2014 5:11pm
Michael McBride, pastor of The Way Christian Center in Berkeley, tweeted a photo of one of the cutouts hanging from the gate after a Cal student in his congregation sent it to him. McBride said there were three cutouts and that police officers took two them down soon after the student learned of them. Students took the third.
“I came down and huddled with the students and attempted to help talk them through what they were experiencing, considering the options of it being an art protest, considering the options that it was of malicious intent,” McBride said. “I don’t know what the intention is or was because of the anonymity associated with it.”
The cutouts had the names of lynching victims and the dates of their deaths, along with #ICantBreathe, a slogan of protests over recent grand jury decisions not to indict officers in the Michael Brown and Eric Garner cases.
UC Berkeley spokeswoman Claire Holmes said police were investigating the incident but had not determined who put the images.
“This is definitely something of concern,” Holmes said. “We’re not sure what the motivation was.” The display appeared to be protesting violence against African Americans, but the actual intent was not made clear.
One cutout depicted Laura Nelson, an eastern Oklahoma woman who was raped and hung from a bridge alongside her son in 1911 after he was accused of shooting a sheriff, according to a 2000 article in the Los Angeles Times.
“We find them to be pointed to the larger concern and struggle that we have — that our bodies are seemingly vulnerable and that there is not equal protection under the law that we are afforded safety from both psychology and physical terror,” McBride said.
Leigh Raiford, an associate professor of African American studies at UC Berkeley, saw the photos on Twitter.
“To me this suggested a really powerful public art installation that was trying to provoke people to make historical connection between the history of lynching, state violence against black folks and the contemporary situation that we’re faced with around police brutality and these non-indictments,” Raiford said.
She tweeted several pieces of protest art that repurposed lynching photos, drawing comparisons.
Chronicle Staff Writer Kevin Fagan contributed to this report.
Greta Kaul is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: gkaul@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @gretakaul
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