SANTA CRUZ — On the heels of citywide efforts to celebrate Juneteenth and bring together community around a vandalized Black Lives Matter street mural, a rope looped like a noose was left hanging downtown around the July Fourth holiday.
Santa Cruz resident La’Sundra McGowan was walking home from the grocery store around 1 p.m. Tuesday when she noticed the rope, tied to a pedestrian walk signal post at the corner of Pacific Avenue and Front Street. It was a busy day downtown, but no one was around her at the moment McGowan realized what she was seeing. It was the second time she had walked past it, herself.
McGowan, at first, said she was about to keep walking by. Then, on impulse, she stopped, backed up and recorded a 9-second video of the hanging rope, with the Town Clock and its rippling American flag in the background. She later posted the video to image-sharing site Instagram with the caption, “Yep … Today. #merica.”
“Honestly, I literally felt like I had been punched in the gut. And then you just kind of feel hollow,” said McGowan when reached Friday to discuss the post, which has since been shared and reposted. “A lot of people were like, why didn’t you take it down? That was literally the farthest thing from my mind. It was just more an emotional response — I wasn’t thinking, ‘I’ve got to get this down.’ I was just gutted.”
On Thursday, the Santa Cruz Police Department opened an investigation after being notified of a social media video post showing the swinging rope, department spokesperson Joyce Blaschke said. The rope itself had already been removed by the time officials were alerted, Blaschke said.
“Right now it’s an active investigation,” Blaschke said. “They’re reaching out to the individual (who posted) to get a better sense of the timeframe and then they’ll be looking at various media in the surrounding area.”
The street corner where the rope was left is the same spot where, a month earlier, someone repeatedly used a racial slur against McGowan, she said. She said that racism in Santa Cruz during her 13 years living there seemed to have gotten worse in the past three years.
“I pretty much have (expletive) PTSD on that corner,” McGowan said.
Hanging ‘noose’ symbolic, has recent local history
Similarly, a rope shaped like a noose was found hanging July 6, 2020 at the base of the UC Santa Cruz campus, near Coolidge Road and High Street). NAACP Santa Cruz issued a statement, at the time, criticizing the UCSC leadership for falling “short of describing what will be done to ensure tangible support and bolster resources for the Black community on campus.”
“In light of the recent racist action that involved the hanging of a noose at the UCSC campus, The UCSC NAACP is appalled both by the boldness of people to intimidate Black lives by echoing the racial violence of past lynching, and by the following complicit nature of our institutional systems to not communicate effectively to the populations which may be directly impacted, such as our Black student leaders,” the NAACP statement reads, in part.
Hours after McGowan posted the video, another Instagram user commented that they had driven by and removed the hanging rope themselves and could not believe that it had been left untouched all day. That individual, who spoke to the Sentinel on the condition of anonymity due to concerns related to potential threats to their family and public-facing job, said they saw the video, drove downtown with a friend, cut it loose and tossed it in the trash. The incident, they said, did not traumatize them, and they later proceeded to go grab a burrito to eat. Instead, they said, the actions spoke to them of a “coward” hiding their true racist feelings.
After she posted the social media video, McGowan said at least one person was quick to criticize her online for doing so.
“It’s something that white people have done to Black people since we first arrived in this country. It represents lynching. It represents, ‘We don’t want you here.’ ‘We want to take control over you.’ ‘We can kill you at any time by stringing you up by a noose,'” McGowan said. “It’s threatening, is what it was, and I shouldn’t feel threatened here.”
Local activist Thairie Ritchie, who organized last month’s March Toward Love and Courage event, was among those who were tagged on reposts of McGowan’s video.
“Definitely it was disappointing, but I’m not surprised, to be brutally honest,” Ritchie said, adding that he hoped elected officials would publicly denounce the act. “It’s very hard to see it being accidental, giving the climate of the mural being repainted and the Juneteenth events.”
