Seinfeld's Kramer, the real life Michael Richards, exploded in a racist tirade at African American audience members who heckled him during a comedy routine. Pointing, Richards screamed "He's a nigger! He's a nigger! He's a nigger! A nigger, look, there's a nigger!" and, looking up above the stage, he declared "Fifty years ago we'd have you upside down with a f***ing fork up your ass."
Kramer was wrong. The "we" he referred to, like minded people who would lynch and mutilate black men for offending them, did not stop 50 years ago. Without Sanctuary, Lynching Photography in America, described one such event as follows:
Early one morning in the 1960s, two young boys bicycling to a favorite fishing hole happened upon this scene: a [black inmate's] dead weight hanging by the neck in a thorny bramble of Georgia hardwoods. After they reported it to the local authroities, the Georgia Bureau of Investigainons' chief looked briefly at the scene and declared, "Suicide." He snapped a photograph, and the investigation was closed.
More recently, on June 7, 1998, a member of Richards' "we" chained James Byrd behind his pick up truck and dragged him for miles until he was dead.
Without Sanctuary chronicles an American lynching tradition captured in photos. The photographs show page after page of gruesome, mutilated, even charred corpes, surrounded by happy people, pointing and smiling for the camera. Richards should read it. Then he might understand why he is so wrong.
Update: Richards appeared on the Letterman Show to explain his actions. Seemingly in denial, he blamed his outburst on rage, Katrina and the war and "looked and acted confused."
