The circulation of the word “lynching” in high political circles is an insult to one of the most despicable words in our language.

Missouri knows about lynching. A study by the Equal Justice Institute two years ago documented 4,084 lynchings in the South between 1877 and 1950. It also found sixty lynchings in Missouri during that time, the second most of any state just outside the south. Oklahoma had 76 of the 341 events labeled by the institute as “racial terror lynchings.”

In April, 1906, Horace Duncan and Fred Coker, accused of rape in Springfield, were taken from the jail and hanged from a tower on the town square. Five-thousand white people—men, women, AND children—watched the hangings and then the burning and shooting of the bodies.

The men had alibis, confirmed by their employers. But the mob never let them have their day in court, never let them present evidence of their innocence. Newspaper reports after the fact said the men were innocent.

A third man, Will Allen, accused of murder without any evidence, was chase down and strung up on the same tower.

That was lynching.

1931. Raymond Gunn confesses to killing a woman at a rural school near Maryville. While Gunn was being taken in the sheriff’s car to a court hearing, a mob stopped the car, dragged Gunn out and took him to the school. He was tied to a roof ridge pole. He and the building were doused with gasoline and the building was set afire. About fifteen minutes later the building collapsed. When the fire burned down enough, spectators took burned fragments of the building as souvenirs.

That was lynching.

In 1919, Jay Lynch was convicted in Lamar of murdering the sheriff and the sheriff’s son during a jail break. Missouri had taken a brief break from having the death penalty so he was sentenced to life in prison. While Lynch was in the judge’s office saying goodbye to his family, two dozen people burst in, put a rope around his neck and dragged him to a nearby tree. When the first branch broke, the rope was thrown over a stronger one and Lynch was hauled up to die. A large crowd cheered. Lynch was one of four white men lynched that year, four out of 83 people lynched that year nationwide.

That was lynching.

1893, Audrain County. Emmett Divers, charged with murdering a white woman, was taken by an estimated crowd of 500 people to and bridge and hanged. After Divers died, his body was taken to the fairground and hung from a pole and later burned.

That was lynching.

1942, Scott County. Cleo Wright, accused of murdering a woman and shot eight times resisting arrest, was grabbed by a mob who poured gasoline on him and burned him in front of a Sikeston church. The incident led Governor Forrest Donnell to order the Highway Patrol and the local sheriff to put more officers on the scene.   But about 100 black residents who fled never went back. Some black residents who stayed armed themselves and patrolled their part of town.

That was lynching.

1923, Columbia. James T. Scott, a University of Missouri janitor, a World War I veteran, the grandson of a slave, was identified by a 14-year old girl as her attacker. A mob using sledge hammers broke into his jail cell, took him out and hanged him from the Stewart Road bridge over the MK&T Railroad tracks.. A University professor who tried to stop the mob was told to get out of the way or he’d be lynched, too. St. Louis newspapers reported the girl identified another man, who had shared the cell with Scott. Reports say Scott told the mob that took him from the jail that the other man, Ollie Watson, had told him that Watson was the attacker.

That was lynching.

Three years ago, the Association for Black Graduate and Professional Students at the university dedicated a historic marker alongside the KATY Trail near the spot where the Stewart Street Bridge, from which James T. Scott was hanged, once stood. “Lest We Forget,” it says at the top.

1882. Kansas City. Moments after a white policeman was shot, Levi Harrington was stopped by officers and arrested although there was no evidence to implicate him in the crime. A crowd forcefully seized Harrington and hanged him from a nearby bridge and shot him.

That was lynching.

In 2018, the Equal Justice Initiative unveiled a plaque not far from the bridge site, commemorating the lynching.

A century earlier, in 1918, Missouri Congressman Leonidas Dyer introduced a bill in the House of Representatives making lynching a federal crime. The Senate approved the bill last year. The House has yet to act. There remains no federal anti-lynching law.

Missouri has no anti-lynching law.  Participants can be charged under murder statutes.

Let us be clear. What is happening in Washington is not a lynching. Saying it is insults our language, cheapens the shameful actions of some of our ancestors, and dismisses the agony of those who fell victim to public savagery.