Lynching is our national shame

Ida B. Wells, who was born enslaved in Mississippi in 1862 and became one of the founders of the NAACP, as well as a writer, educator, and civil rights leader, is quoted as saying that “our county’s national crime is lynching.”

A few days after the Supreme Court, in an opinion by Justice Samuel Alito, destroyed Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act in Louisiana v. Callais, I joined a group of 37 members of my northern New Jersey synagogue, Congregation Beth Sholom, to travel with Etgar 36. Starting in Atlanta, at the childhood home of the late Dr. Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., we journeyed to Birmingham, Selma, and Montgomery, Alabama. It was a civil rights/voting rights pilgrimage.

I was the only “child of the south” on the trip.

Although I have called northern New Jersey home for the bulk of the last 30 years, I was an infant when my parents and I moved from Detroit to Atlanta in 1961. My first experiences were as a Jew in the South; I had white skin, so I could pass for white, except when the children I went to public school with would remind me that I wasn’t white. No, I was Jewish. Jewish was said with a sneer.

Now, not all the white folks I encountered behaved like this. In fact, the majority did not. But as we all know, it only takes one or two aggressions — a couple of words — to do damage. So I know a bit about passing; being allowed a level of privilege because of something as trivial, or significant, as the color of my skin, my eyes.

And something as trivial or significant as skin color was the subtext of everything we did on this trip. Especially coming on the heels of the Supreme Court vote to gut the Voting Rights Act; possibly the most important piece of legislation passed in the second half of the 20th century.

My late parents opened a lunch counter in the city of Atlanta in 1962. In the South, this was still the time of Jim Crow. The counter was integrated. Occasionally, rocks were thrown through the front window of the sandwich shop. Occasionally, a nicely dressed middle-aged white man would come in close to closing time, sit at the counter with a cup of coffee, and casually mention to my father that it was in bad taste to allow certain folks to sit at the counter. My father would always say he hoped they enjoyed their coffee and could leave now. Other things that don’t require a mention also happened, but I will let you know that in my middle-class neighborhood, there were daddies with white sheets hanging in their closets, and copies of broadsheets and pamphlets from the Klan in their garages.

My father used to tell the story that when they first moved to Atlanta, he went to register to vote in Dekalb County. He was met by an older white woman who looked at his birth certificate and honorable discharge from the United States Marines — he was in Korea — asked him if Weinstein was a Negro name. Only she didn’t use the term Negro. She used another term: the N word. She asked him to take a literacy test. He looked at the test and asked her to read his discharge papers. He did not get registered that day.

And so I found myself in Selma at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the site of Bloody Sunday, March 7, 1965. My former congressman, the late John Lewis, was attacked and beaten there. More than 600 other civil rights marchers also were attacked and beaten there.  I stood there, over the Alabama River, once used to carry enslaved Black people to market to be sold.

My uncle was a volunteer during the Mississippi Freedom Summer in June of 1964. He came from Detroit to help Black folks register to vote in Mississippi. He would stay with us when he was not working on this project. My mother informed me, many years later, that our phones were tapped then.

There was not much traffic on the bridge, but it was loud in my soul, my heart, my mind. As soon as the Supreme Court announced it was gutting the VRA, several Southern state governors announced they would redraw their electoral maps immediately and hold off primary elections. Circumventing the right to vote to prevent the right to vote and elect representation of your choice. The process of eliminating Black votes continues daily.

In 1990, under the direction of the late executive director Ed Brown, I had the opportunity to work with the Voter Education Project on a 25th anniversary celebration of the passage of the VRA. Founded by then-Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, with participation from the NAACP, the Congress of Racial Equality, the Southern Christan Leadership Council, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, under the umbrella of the Southern Regional Council, the goal was to fund voter registration work in the southern United States. (Randolph Blackwell, Vernon Jordan, and eventually, John Lewis would serve as executive directors.) I remember hearing the folks who walked the talk about what they went through. The evening was a bit of a celebration. Now, looking back, I see that we were naive.

Throughout the South, and sometimes in the North, a favorite tool of white supremacy was lynching. Before the Civil War, and continuing during the civil rights movement, self-appointed mobs took the law into their own hands, with a lack of due process, and just burned or hung Black folks. I knew people who spoke about grandparents, cousins, or neighbors who died this way. Scare tactics to force behavior. Doing anything and everything to keep the folks you don’t want to vote, to live their lives, to tell the truth. To be free.

In Montgomery, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice is a powerful reminder of the many thousands of Black Americans who have been lynched. I stood at the place marker for Dekalb and Fulton Counties, the counties I lived in for 35 years of my life.  There were so many names listed for Fulton County that they took up two full columns. I wondered about all the nameless. The ones who disappeared.

I don’t know when I started to cry, but a young man who worked at the memorial come up to me to ask if I was okay. I told him no, that our shared history is sometimes cruel. That I remembered hearing about lynchings as a child. Of Black folks that I knew who kept memories alive.

As I sit in my living room in northern New Jersey and think about being in Atlanta, Birmingham, Selma, and Montgomery, it all seems so unreal. Yet it is real. As late as 2020, Ahmaud Arbery was lynched in Georgia.

This is our country’s history. Not Black history. Our history. And it is ours to respect and preserve or to forget and lose. It will not end with the eradication of the VOA; there is still the SAVE Act, which will complicate the lives of mostly women who change their names through marriage. There are attempts to limit the locations of polling places, making it harder for folks to get to a ballot box. These are just fancy poll taxes.

We stand at a crossroads in 2026 America. Our national crime of lynching was a tool of fear and control. Step out of line, protest too much, stand up and be counted, speak your mind — end up in a noose. In September 2025, a noose was discovered in Atlanta, outside the APEX Museum (African American Panoramic Experience). In March of this year, a small figure was discovered tied with a noose in a Chicago neighborhood.

This isn’t a Southern or a Northern problem. This is an American problem. This is our problem. Two summers ago, I drove through the Adirondack Mountains on the way to Fort Ticonderoga in upstate New York. I saw a Confederate battle flag across the front of a house. I had to pull over and throw up. The only thing that flag stands for is racism and fear. It is vile and violent. It is lynching, burning, murder. It is a part of our history, American history, that we must reject and repudiate.

It is not what thousands marched and struggled for. We must be better than this. We must be worthy of the memory of those who were lynched, who marched, who registered voters. We must make a better, nobler, American history.

Carol Weinstein is originally from Atlanta and has lived in Bergen County since 1998. She practices social work that empowers and offers dignity to low-income older adults.