International Socialist Review Issue 11, Spring 2000 The Socialist Case Against the Death Penalty On August 28, 1955, 14-year-old Emmet Till—a teenager from Chicago visiting relatives in the town of Sumner, Missisippi—was taken by two white men from his great aunt’s house, beaten, mutilated and shot to death. His crime? Saying “Bye, baby” to a white girl working the counter as he left a local candy store. A moving response to Emmet Till’s murder was published in 1955 in the socialist publication The American Socialist. Much violence has calloused our sensibilities in this day and age. Yet there is something about the murder of Emmet Louis Till to touch even the coldest heart. The thought that in this America, full-grown and brawny men would abduct a grade-school child, and beat him in his helplessness until all his teeth were out, his head caved in, his body mutilated with horrible wounds, put a bullet into his brain and drop him into a river—truly, even the most emotionally impervious cannot fail to be aroused. In a decaying social order, man’s inhumanity to man includes man’s inhumanity to children. And the children, even in their years of hope and light-heartedness, are forced to taste the bitter fruits of knowledge. During the Second World War, one of those public school essay contests in which children are asked to write answers to usually fatuous questions was held, the question being: “How would you punish Hitler for his crimes?” On one paper written by a little Black girl, the answer was startling: “I would put him in a Black skin and force him to spend the rest of this life in the United States.” Here was a pathetic early wisdom. And Emmet Louis Till also, in his final hour, knew more about our Southland and the desperate forces at work in it than any college of sociologists. May we be granted the power to build a world in which our children will be spared such lessons! Racism and violence are ingrained into the very core of U.S. capitalism. The American ruling-class tradition is one in which it uses every means at its disposal to weaken and divide the working-class movement—and to try and crush it when it rises up. It is distinct from other ruling classes not in nature, but in degree: the level of racism that has historically surpassed that of every other advanced industrial society, with the exception of South African apartheid, and the scale of violence that it is willing to use. These two factors intersect sharply in the history of capital punishment in the U.S. It is no accident that the majority of executions in the United States take place in the South, or that Blacks end up on death row disproportionate to their numbers in the population. Between 1882 and 1903 alone, 1,985 Blacks were lynched in the South, often on false charges of raping or merely insulting white women. This practice has continued long after vigilante violence has declined, replaced today by legal lynching. The ruling class has also used judicial murder as a means to suppress the labor movement and political dissidence. The Molly McGuires, the Haymarket Martyrs, Joe Hill, Sacco and Vanzetti and the Rosenbergs are only the most well-known. Tom Mooney was one such socialist and working-class militant framed for murder and convicted in 1916. The great socialist orator Eugene Debs said of him what could be said for dozens of fighters in American history. What is Tom Mooney guilty of? I will tell youÖ For years he has been fighting bravely and without compromise the battles of the working class out on the Pacific coastÖ The henchmen of the powerful and corrupt corporations, concluding finally that he could not be bought or bribed or bullied, decided he must therefore be murdered. That is why Tom Mooney is today a life prisoner, and why he would have been hanged as a felon long ago but for the world-wide protest of the working class. The death penalty is, at its heart, a class question. As Debs once wrote: “The rich man goes to prison only as the exception to prove the rule.” In an article against capital punishment, the Polish-born German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg likened the bourgeois justice system to “a net” which allows “the voracious sharks to escape” and only catches “the little sardines.” Nowhere is the axiom “One law for the rich, one for the poor” more true and more glaringly obvious than in the United States, which sends the occasional rich plunderer convicted of a crime to a country club and homeless men who steal slices of pizza to maximum-security prisons for life. In the United States, race and class intersect to produce a justice system that targets the poorest in our society—and disproportionately the poor and Black. Hence the struggle against the death penalty in the U.S. is both a struggle against racial inequality and part of the class struggle. It is a fight we must link to the fight against the justice system as a whole, and ultimately against the system of class rule that it aims to uphold.