On several occasions when I talked to people about the lynching of James Scott, they have asked me whether I thought such a thing could happen in Columbia, or in America, today. My answer prior to May 1, 2011, was generally a cautious "No." I'd say something like, "It would be naive to think that we have entirely left behind our wolfish instinct to become part of a pack, to abandon all human sympathy for some victim/enemy, and to rejoice in destroying him." But then I would say, "our wolfishness these days takes the form of virtual lynchings rather than actual ones." And often I would point to savage attacks on individuals made in anonymous postings on websites and such. Or to graffitti in bathroom stalls.
Watching America's, and Columbia's, reaction to the death of Osama bin Laden has changed my answer. One day several hundred sober Columbia's gather to commemorate the murderous mob action that took the life of James T. Scott in 1923. The very next night several hundred people gathered on the University campus to celebrate the death of Osama. Like their predecessors of 1923, the revelers of 2011 were predominantly young white men, often fairly drunk ones, celebrating the death a darker-skinned man who had at last "got what was coming to him."
Osama isn't Scott. I believe that Scott was an innocent man, killed because he superficially resembled a guilty one at a point when many in Columbia wanted a scapegoat to vent their rage on. I have no brief for Osama, and believe him to have been guilty of horrible crimes. Nonetheless, the celebrations on campus after midnight on May 2, 2011, brought to mind all to clearly the "celebrations" after midnight on April 29, 1923. There was a kind of tribal violence in the air that will prevent my saying quite so confidently as I used to that we are past the period where our town, or another American town, could countenance a lynching.
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