The U.S. wants to livestream Nidal Hasan’s execution. Black Americans know the history of public killing
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From lynchings to Rainey Bethea’s 1936 hanging, public executions have long been intertwined with race, power and spectacle in America.
This week, the Pentagon confirmed plans to livestream the execution of Nidal Hasan. Hasan, the former Army major who killed 13 people in 2009 in Fort Hood, Texas, will be executed by firing squad on Dec. 3. And while social media users are shocked by the government’s decision to livestream the violent execution style, which the United States has not used since 1945, Black communities are no strangers to public executions. For years, Black people across this country have been victims of capital punishment dating back to slavery, extrajudicial lynchings, and the Jim Crow era.
In fact, one of the last public executions in the United States was that of Rainey Bethea, a Black man in Kentucky who was publicly hanged for reportedly raping and killing a 70-year-old white woman in 1936. After Elza Edwards was found dead in her home, local coroners determined that she had been strangled and sexually assaulted. In their investigation, local officials at the time turned their attention to Bethea, who was in his 20s and had been hired by Edwards to clean her home. Using his fingerprints that were found in the home, Bethea was ultimately charged with rape despite his DNA not being found on the victim’s body. In addition to a lack of evidence, experts note that Kentucky officials intentionally charged him with rape and not murder, as the state’s old laws punished convicted rapists with public hangings, while convicted murderers faced the electric chair.
Though public executions were once seen as common practice in cities across the country, at the time Kentucky’s decision to publicly execute Bethea was seen as rare due to many states having shifted to more controlled forms of capital punishment (ex, electric chairs, lethal injections, etc.). This led nearly 20,000 people from around the country to witness Bethea’s public hanging. A year later, Roscoe “Red” Jackson’s public execution in Missouri drew hundreds, marking the last public executions in the United States, per the Center for Death Penalty Litigation (CDPL).
However, after reporters likened the crowd at Bethea’s execution to a “carnival,” Kentucky joined other states banning public executions.
“Instead of promoting the sanctity of life and how solemn the circumstance was, with people applauding and having a carnival-like atmosphere, that really turned people off,” Michael L. Radelet, professor emeritus at the University of Colorado Boulder, told the Associated Press.
Fast forward to today, and many experts note concerns about the broadcast plans surrounding the execution of Hasan, who has been in military custody since 2013. In a recent interview, U.S. Secretary of War Peter Hegseth declared that they would “make sure that people are able to watch” Hasan’s execution.
“That it’s public. Because people need to understand that there are serious consequences for these types of things,” he added.
Current US law prohibits the recording and broadcasting of executions in federal prisons; however, there are no such regulations for military executions. Robin Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, underscored this to the Associated Press, explaining the lack of precedent and regulation for livestreaming an execution on the internet or otherwise making it widely available to the public. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, the last military execution took place in 1961, when U.S. Army Private John A. Bennett, a Black man, was hanged following a rape and attempted murder conviction.
While only time will tell if and how Hegseth will broadcast Hasan’s death, the announcement and plans to spotlight such violence point to a larger pattern.
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“White people are surprised that Pete Hegseth wants the execution of Nidal Hasan to be public? Your lineage used to gather in town to watch Black people get lynched,” one Threads user noted. “This is as American as it gets for this racist administration.”
“They used to lynch Black people, in broad daylight, in the middle of the town square, for spectacle, for sport, and the sheer fact that they could get away with it. And if you don’t think that correlates to what they are about to do to Nidal Hasan, you are out of your mind,” another user added.
And while the last formal executions were documented decades ago, through the years Black communities have continuously grieved the lives of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tyre Nichols, Daunte Wright, Atatiana Jefferson, Philando Castile, Freddie Gray, Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Sonya Massey, and many more who have lost their lives at the hands of law enforcement.
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As Henderson Hill, founder of the Center for Death Penalty Litigation (CDPL) wrote in the Racist Roots report: “The death penalty’s history is inseparable from our history of slavery, Jim Crow, and mass incarceration. Even as the number of executions and death sentences declines, it remains a powerful symbol of white supremacy.”