More than four dozen nooses have been reported at 40 construction sites across the United States and Canada since 2015, according to a Washington Post analysis of news reports and court documents. Black workers, who make up only 6% of the construction workforce, have often been the first to find them.
Sites where nooses have been found include Apple’s Silicon Valley headquarters, a Facebook data center in Iowa, and a future Amazon warehouse in Connecticut, where eight nooses were found in five weeks. All three companies have paused construction on massive projects in response to these incidents. Often the culprit is not found, and only one of the incidents examined by the Post led to an arrest.
The symbolism is unambiguous, harking back to the days when the “threats of violence replaced slavery” as a tool of social control against Black Americans, said Lydia Bates, a Ku Klux Klan expert with the Southern Poverty Law Center. It evokes America’s ugly history of lynching, when the noose was an implement of terror and murder used primarily against Black people, particularly in the South, after the Civil War and well into the 20th century.
Though the financial implications vary — from lost wages to project delays — Bates said such harassment has a cumulative cost, affecting the “emotional, psychological and physical well-being of entire communities.”
