A noose was found in D.C. two days before Juneteenth. It’s the third such case this month

As cities throughout the country prepared for Juneteenth — the annual June 19 celebration that commemorates the end of slavery 152 years ago — a noose was found in the nation’s capital.

Police discovered it hanging from a lamp post on Saturday outside of Washington’s National Gallery of Art. Its appearance comes three weeks after another noose was found less than a mile away on the grounds of the Hirshorn contemporary art museum. Earlier that week, another noose was found on the floor of the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

“We are an inclusive city, and we do not tolerate signs of hate, ignorance and fear,” Muriel Bowser, the mayor of Washington, D.C., said in a statement earlier this month condemning the earlier incidents. “Our diversity is what makes us stronger, and we will not relent in promoting and defending D.C. values. We do not take these incidents lightly, and we will not accept that signs of hate are signs of our time.”

The discoveries haven’t been isolated to the museums surrounding the National Mall, or to Washington.

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the frequency of racially motivated crimes has surged since the 2016 presidential election. Between November and April, the center documented 1,863 “bias incidents” — defined as actions motivated by prejudice — 292 of which were racial. Several of those involved the display of nooses.

The noose is a dark reminder of America’s torrid past when lynchings were commonplace. In Jim Crow’s segregated South, roughly 4,000 people — most of them African Americans — were killed by hanging between 1877 and 1950.

Here is a roundup of other recent noose incidents:

• June 15, Gaithersburg, Md.: A noose was found hanging from a tree at an apartment complex.
• Jun 3, southeast Washington, D.C.: Police found a noose displayed on the front door of a house under construction.
• May 25, Oakland: A noose was found at the Port of Oakland — the second such incident there in two weeks — prompting a brief walkout from longshoremen.
• May 11, Baltimore: Two 19-year-old men were arrested for allegedly hanging a noose to a light fixture outside a middle school in Baltimore after a teacher noticed it from his classroom window.
• April 27, College Park, Md.: A noose was left in the kitchen of the Phi Kappa Tau fraternity house at the University of Maryland.

The noose incidents are part of a larger pattern of racially charged crimes.

In May, bananas were found dangling from nooses on American University’s campus the same day that student Taylor Dumpson became the university’s first black woman student body president. Written on the bananas were “Harambe bait” — a reference to the gorilla who was killed last year — and “AKA free,” a reference to the predominantly black Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority to which Dumpson belongs.

“Being first isn’t easy,” Dumpson wrote in a statement shortly after the incident.

The University of Maryland has also been plagued by racially charged events that escalated in late May when Richard Collins III, a black Army lieutenant and soon-to-be graduate of Bowie State University, was stabbed to death on campus.

Collins’ attacker, Sean Christopher Urbanski, a white student, had been affiliated with a Facebook group that posted racist hate-filled messages. He was charged with murder. The FBI and Maryland authorities are still investigating whether the killing was a hate crime.

colleen.shalby@latimes.com

Twitter: @cshalby

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