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The clothed dummy had black gloves and a black head, perhaps creating the impression the hangman was black, but the homeowner who put up the display said the dark material was meant to be an executioner’s hood.
“We did not mean to offend anyone in any way,” said the woman, who declined to confirm her name. “We just meant to have it for entertainment value, for a simple Halloween display.”
The mannequin no longer hung from the tree Tuesday but the rest of the yard’s Halloween decorations remained. A makeshift cemetery in the front yard featured about half a dozen headstones as well as a partially buried coffin with skeleton hands poking out. A shimmery ghost swayed by the front door.
A number of people who saw the display last week complained to Lenard Wells, a prominent member of the local black community. He viewed the display himself and said it left him stunned.
“Sometimes we may forget we may be only a few blocks away from insensitivity,” said Wells, the director of adult education at Concordia University South Center. “The question becomes, why couldn’t they see the insensitivity of this Halloween display?”
The homeowner said the family hung the same mannequin last year for about six weeks without a single complaint and she was surprised by the negative attention it received this year.
“I’m saddened. It’s gotten to the point where instead of looking for the good in a person, everyone’s looking for hatred,” she said.
Neighbor Julie Salmeron agreed, saying she saw nothing racist in the display.
“I just thought it was a Halloween display, nothing unusual,” she said.
But there’s zero relation between Halloween and nooses, Wells said.
“Show me in any of your Halloween stories where we promoted hangings,” he said. “When I was a kid, we cut holes in pumpkins, we put candles in pumpkins, but we did not hang whites in Ku Klux Klan robes in the oak tree in the front yard. And I’m from Alabama.”
Hangings traumatize the black community in a way that others don’t understand because lynchings weren’t part of any other race’s history, Wells said.
Wendell J. Harris, the education chair for the Milwaukee chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, went with Wells to see the display. He agreed it was offensive and applauded the family for taking it down.
“They have every right to put it up, but I think it’s commendable of them to respond as they have, being considerate to the people who were offended,” he said.
Harris said he wouldn’t mind if the dummy were white, saying whites don’t have the same deep psychological history of pain associated with nooses. But Wells said the display would be insensitive regardless of the color.
The homeowner said she briefly considered replacing the mannequin’s black hood with a pumpkin head, but decided against having any dangling figure altogether.
“With the way everything’s gone, we’ll probably just give it a pumpkin head and set it on the porch instead,” she said.
