Law enforcement is investigating who hung a dummy bearing a President Obama face mask from the Lefholz Bridge over I-70 near Grain Valley, Missouri. Police were alerted to the dummy about 5:30 Monday morning. After police shut down the bridge and blocked off the highway, work crews used a robot to remove the dummy and place it in a nearby field, where it was examined for possible explosives.
Sergeant Ronda Montgomery explains:
The item that we had, we thought possibly could have been explosive, so we went ahead and shut down I-70 is both directions to ensure that if it was explosive there was nothing that was going to cause a hazard to any passerbys, and once we removed that from the scene we opened up I-70 almost immediately.
It is possible, but not confirmed, that the lynching-in-effigy is connected to an organization called “Overpasses for Obama’s Impeachment,” which has organized events on highway overpasses to protest President Obama in the past.
Bloggers post angry responses on the Daily Kos. A diarist writes:
If you’re going to do it, stand up and own your work and face the consequences. Explain why you did it. Otherwise, everyone knows the truth: you’re just a bunch of conspiracy minded racists who are too chicken to own your own message.
Someone else points out:
The difference, that they refuse to see, is that when we burned Reagan in effigy we stood there, in plain sight, for all to see. We didn’t hang him over a freeway in the wee hours of the morning and run away like cowards.
And a third commenter notes:
And, as has been mentioned many, many times … there is a world of difference between the political tradition of hanging and burning an effigy in protest and the dead-of-night terrorism that lynching a person of color represents, even symbolically. One is a political statement. The other is naked racism. Only the basest, most deceitful idiots refuse to see the difference.
This is not the first time Obama has been lynched in effigy. In June 2012, Koran-burning pastor Terry Lynch hung an Obama effigy on the front lawn of his Gainesville, Florida church. Later that year, a Charlotte, NC man drove around town with an Obama dummy hanging, as if lynched, in the bed of his pickup truck.?Around that same time, a fake photo of Obama being lynched caused controversy in Jacksonville, Florida.
In January 2014, a conservative group, America the Next Generation, called for Obama’s lynching and for that day to be made a national holiday. And a month later, a Houston-are firefighter was fired after posting an image of Obama being lynched on his Facebook page, apparently a repost of the America the Next Generation image. All of the perpetrators denied that their depictions of America’s first black president being lynched had any racial connotations.
Here is a video:
Edited/Published by: SB
Published writer since 2001, focusing on politics, history, Web development, and other topics. First book is coming soon.
