So You Want to Talk About Lynching – a prayer

A Litany for Remembrance

by Robert Hoch (October 24, 2019)

Adapted from Michele Norris, “So You Want to Talk About Lynching?” in the Washington Post (23 October 2019)

So you want to talk about lynching?

 

O God, we confess that we know too little about lynching.

 

A lynching involved a man or a woman, or sometimes a child, dragged from their homes, hauled out like lambs to be slaughtered.

 

O God, we confess that we know too little about lynching.

 

A lynching also involved a man (almost always a man) who had a rope or a rope that was ready with a noose. It had to be a coarse, heavy, corded rope.

 

O God, we confess that we know too little about lynching.

 

A lynching was an impulsive act, but the actual lynching itself took technique, skill; someone had to know how to find the tree suited to the work, a branch strong enough, high enough, to do the work.

 

O God, we confess that we know too little about lynching.

 

It took a lot of people to hold a lynching. Good people. People who taught Sunday School. People who looked the other way. Dedicated people. Nice people.

 

O God, we confess that we know too little about lynching.

 

According to the NAACP, 4,743 people were lynched in the United States from 1882 to 1968. 3,446 were black.

 

O God, we confess that we know too little about lynching.

 

No matter what, gravity always won.

 

O God, we confess that we know far too much about lynching.

 

Forgive us, O God, but not too quickly.

Forgive us, O God, but not too cheaply.

Forgive us, O God.