There was yet another disturbing discovery involving a noose near Ground Zero in Manhattan Thursday. This time one was found hanging from a lamppost at the Church Street Post Office.
While police said it's not clear where or at whom the Church Street noose might have been directed, detectives at the NYPD Hate Crime task force have 56 hours of surveillance tapes to comb through, trying to catch the person who hung a noose on Professor Madonna Constantine's door at Columbia University. A colleague, who Constantine is suing for defamation, says she had nothing to do placing this vile symbol of racism at her door.
Nooses -- deplored as symbols of lynchings in the Old South -- have appeared in recent incidents in the New York area and across the country. In Queens, a white woman was arrested after threatening to kill her black neighbor's children with a noose. Other nooses have been found at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy in New London, Connecticut, and in the Hempstead Police Department's locker room on Long Island.
Has the Jena 6 case caused all these copycat? Is it Barack Obama backlash? Is there something deeper afoot? While no real database on nooses around the country, we have seen an increase in the last 10 to 15 years all over the U.S. -- not just the south." Hate crimes in New York City were up 10 percent last year, with 256 incidents reported.