Oh. I did not know that. It must be true though, since Martin Luther King III of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference said so.
And he gets to run Palm Beach County ragged looking for the melanin-deprived individuals who must certainly have hanged a black gentleman. A suicidal black gentleman. A suicidal black gentleman who said he was going to go hang himself. And did. In his grandmother's yard, with a sheet from his grandmother's house.
But don't try to tell that to Martin Luther King III and the SCLC. They don't care about the inquest or the investigations. They're too busy trying to ascertain just how many times they can cry "wolf" before nobody listens to them anymore.
Civil rights group's focus is offPosted by floridacracker at May 23, 2004 08:24 PMMartyrdom comes cheap in Belle Glade.
Ray Golden was depressed. Muddled by drink and cocaine. Twice divorced. Violent with women. He was a neglectful father. Unemployed. Nearly $50,000 behind in child-support payments.
And suicidal. His cousin told the Florida Department of Law Enforcement that Golden had frequently talked of committing suicide, once suggesting that he might hang himself in his grandmother's yard.
One year ago this week, Feraris ''Ray'' Golden, 32, did just that. His body was found hanging from a schefflera tree by his grandmother's house -- a miserable life that ended on a rainy night in near anonymity.
Death, however, has anointed Ray Golden with a peculiar celebrity. Golden's hanging suicide on May 27, 2003, recalled horrible images of racist lynchings that were once epidemic in the Old South. And Belle Glade can still pass for the Old South.
In the western reaches of Palm Beach County, the farm town is desperately poor and racially divided, having more in common with the Mississippi Delta than with metropolitan areas 30 minutes east. It's a place apt to nurture talk of a lynch mob.
INQUEST HELD
A few opportunistic politicians exploited the rumors, suggesting that local cops were covering up the truth. An inquest, the first in Palm Beach County in 18 years, was called to replace rumors with facts.
In two days of testimony, it was revealed that Golden had been found hanging from a bedsheet taken from his grandmother's nearby house. His hands were not tied. The body was not bruised. No cuts. No burns. No signs of a struggle. No one along the quiet residential street where he died saw anything resembling a lynch mob.
The presiding judge asked that anyone with information contradicting a finding of suicide come forward. No one did.
But the inquest hardly discouraged the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The SCLC sailed into Belle Glade late with the same loose grasp of the facts the organization demonstrated in Broward County last week, when it came to champion Miriam Oliphant, the incompetent county supervisor of elections who was ousted, oddly enough, for incompetence.
Martin Luther King III, president of the SCLC last fall (he has since left the post), came to Belle Glade promising to deliver the real truth about Golden's death. King offered no new information, just this morsel of blind faith: ``Black folks don't hang themselves.''
In September, the FDLE opened yet another investigation, interviewing 20 witnesses, chasing down even the thinnest of leads. FDLE reported that it found ''no credible evidence'' that contradicted suicide.
Yet the lynching of Ray Golden reverberates through the Internet like a biblical revelation. Cyber conspiracy stories refer to King's charge of a possible coverup as fact. The stories note that SCLC promised an investigation and hell-raising marches through the streets of Belle Glade.
The SCLC, however, has been a scarce commodity around those parts since last fall. Instead, the venerated civil rights organization has turned its attention to Miriam Oliphant, yet another cause with scant merit.
REAL INJUSTICE
What's maddening is that the fields around Belle Glade have long been ripe with real injustice.
Just days before Martin Luther King III showed up in Belle Glade, trying to transform a pathetic suicide into a racist lynching, The Herald ran a gut-wrenching series on the perpetual plight of farmworkers in Florida's fields.
These workers, The Herald's Ronnie Greene documented, are cheated of wages, abused by their bosses, housed in shacks and kept locked up in virtual peonage.
Surely, the word ''slavery,'' documented by hard reporting, should have piqued the interest of a crusading civil rights organization.
Slavery, unlike the faux lynching of Ray Golden, seems like an evil truly worth pursuing.