Mississippi, U.S.A.

Lynch Mob Murder of Black Worker

In the early morning hours of June 26, seven white teenagers set out in two vehicles from the nearly all-white town of Brandon, Mississippi, with the expressed intent to find a black man to attack. Exiting the highway in Jackson, the largely black state capital, the racist thugs came upon James Craig Anderson, a 49-year-old black auto worker, in a motel parking lot. The teenagers robbed Anderson and beat him mercilessly, spewing racist epithets and chanting “white power.” Not content with this savagery, one of the teenagers, Deryl Dedmon, floored the gas in his Ford pickup truck and drove it over Anderson, killing him instantly. Dedmon boasted to his friends later that morning, “I ran that n----r over!”

This lynching punctured yet again the myth of a racially harmonious “new South” that supposedly sprang from the civil rights reforms of the 1960s. The U.S. Justice Department boasts of laying to rest the “ghosts of Mississippi” by imprisoning a handful of octogenarian KKK killers for a few months before they die. But black oppression and murderous racist violence remain cornerstones of the American capitalist order, North and South.

Shortly after Anderson’s killing, Dedmon and one of his cohorts, John Rice, were arrested and charged with murder. Having been subsequently released on bail, Dedmon was returned to custody after police reviewed film taken by a motel surveillance camera overlooking the parking lot that recorded the killing. Rice was released on $5,000 bail and now faces charges only of simple assault. Having by and large kept the horrendous killing under wraps, the capitalist media began to widely report the story only after news of the surveillance film became known.

Attempting to deflect anger over the lynching, Jackson NAACP president Wayne McDaniels declared, “We’re concerned about this being a hate crime, but we also need to exert some energy on black on black crime” (Jackson Advocate, 30 June)! This is a grotesque echo of the sermonizing of the Jesse Jacksons and Barack Obamas, who essentially blame black people for their own oppression. Sharply exposing the hypocrisy of such “blame the victim” garbage, a posting on the Voice of Detroit news Web site noted about the scum who killed Anderson: “To date, the Mayor of Jackson has not attacked the parents or blamed them for not watching their children better! There was no going to church and criticizing all white teens!... There was no telling them they were a disgrace to their race! No teen was told to pull up your pants!”

More than 500 people turned out in Jackson on August 14 to protest the lynching. This was a notable demonstration in the Deep South, which is marked by the legacy of black chattel slavery. That legacy was stamped into the life of James Anderson, a churchgoing man who had a family with his male partner of 17 years. Anderson worked for seven years on the Nissan assembly line in Canton, Mississippi, where the predominantly black workforce makes $4 per hour less than the mainly white workers at Nissan’s plant in Smyrna, Tennessee. Deep in the open shop South, these workers have no union. Particularly in the South, the capitalists have historically used racist discrimination, supplemented by official and extralegal terror, to divide the workers and keep unions out. While the AFL-CIO misleaders mouth words about organizing Southern plants, their acceptance of the capitalist profit system and reliance on Democratic Party politicians have led only to defeat for the workers.

Jackson today has a black mayor and black police chief, the county has a black D.A., and a “white power” terrorist has been charged with murder. These things would have been all but unthinkable half a century ago in Jackson, where in 1963 Mississippi NAACP organizer Medgar Evers was assassinated in front of his house, after which his killer ran free for three decades. But putting some black faces in government offices and police posts—or having a black president—does nothing to change the nature of the capitalist state as an apparatus of organized violence to repress the working class and enforce the oppression of black people, immigrants and other minorities. Over the last several decades, black Democratic Party mayors throughout the country have helped enforce the racist oppression against the black masses, acting as overseers for the white capitalist ruling class. There can be no justice for black people in this racist capitalist system!

The social power to smash the racist lynchers lies in the multiracial working class, mobilized independently of and in opposition to the capitalist Republican and Democratic parties. As a key and militant component of the proletariat, black workers will play a leadership role in the fight for a workers government that will finish the Civil War by eradicating exploitation and racial oppression, opening the road to freedom for all mankind. That struggle requires the leadership of a workers party marching under the banner: Black liberation through socialist revolution!