The infamous Willie Lynch letter – Fake or fact?

Feb 04, 2018 Countryman, Features / Columnists

By Dennis Nichols

It surfaced sometime in the nineteen seventies, and hit the internet in 1993. I got a copy of it from a friend in 2008, and read in disbelief. Many have dubbed it pure fiction but some aren’t so sure.
My verdict is still out, but for its sheer inhumanity and the psychological insight into conditioned human behaviour it provides, the ‘Willie Lynch letter’ should be mandatory reading and study (maybe at the college level) if only to help us better understand the nexus between New World physical slavery, its psychological component, and what appears to be a continual thread of mental bondage running through generations of black Americans, including those of us in South and Central America and the Caribbean.
This thread has been bemoaned and given voice by socially-conscious men and women over the years, complementing the pronouncements of people like Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Marcus Garvey, Martin Luther King Jr., Walter Rodney, and Bob Marley among others.
And even today, there is the tendency of people whose ancestors had been forced into servitude to continually act as though the abolition of slavery, the achievement of civil rights, and the election of the first black US president were fanciful dreams.
With February designated as Black History Month, I wonder how many of us will at least reflect on the Black New World experience over the past 400 years, and pay more than lip service to the words and deeds of those mentioned above and other like-minded individuals. Slavery and post-emancipation dependence of the kind seen in the Americas has left us a curious legacy.
For some, the bullwhip and the noose have been replaced by the gun and the baton. The metal chains and rings are smaller, and have become cosmetic; tattoo pens have replaced branding irons. Broad-shouldered humans who looked like men now opt for feminine charm, and slender-looking females are able to emasculate men with frightening ease.
Of course there are lots of strong, independent black men and women around, and the right to choose how we want to look, and live, is a valid one. Fine, if we’re all happy, healthy, productive, and independent human beings. But we’re not, and too many black people seem to have permanently prefixed ‘un’ to three of those adjectives, while removing ‘in’ from the last. Why? Well, if you believe the Willie Lynch letter is authentic, go back 300 years and get a clue.
The letter purportedly post-dates and records verbatim the delivery of a speech by one William Lynch, a slaveowner in the West Indies. He had travelled from the islands, and one day in 1712, on the banks of the James River in Virginia, spoke to a group of fellow slaveowners.
Now according to Wikipedia, the speech has been deemed a hoax by historians. Yet a letter exists, and someone wrote it. Whoever did has penned a provocative ‘masterpiece’ – a searing indictment on the capacity of the human brain to devise a most abhorrent system of brutal conditioning and psychological entrapment; or it may just be the concoction of a twisted mind. (Note: some of the following excerpts from the letter are paraphrased)
With scant introduction, the speech/letter gets quickly to the heart of what the speaker sees as the slaveowners’ predicament – inability to control their slaves resulting in unnecessary loss of labour, and negative impact on the economies of American plantations. He says he caught the ‘whiff of a dead slave hanging from a tree’ journeying to his destination, and obviously didn’t like the financial implication.
Better to ‘train’ the slaves, Lynch advocates, by his method – a foolproof design to control them. Basically the slaveowner must, without pity, beat, bully, and brainwash his ‘n***ers’ into fear, docility, obedience, and loyalty, the way wild horses are broken and domesticated, only with greater savagery and cunning. This was to be done while exploiting their differences and setting them against each other based on variables like age, colour (shade) intelligence, size and sex.
This, he states, involves pitting the young and old males against each other, dark-skinned slaves versus light-skinned ones, and male against female. Following this indoctrination, he predicts, envy and distrust of each other will lead to them loving, respecting, and trusting only their white owners. (Think of Samuel Jackson’s character, Stephen, in ‘Django Unchained’)
In the long run, he concludes, such conditioning will become self-refueling and self-generating for hundreds; maybe thousands of years. He goes on to speak about how to reduce slaves, like horses, from their natural state to one of dependency by the process of ‘breaking’, particularly the will to resist.
The beginning of this process involves a male, a female, her infant, and spectator slaves, and is described in grisly and humiliating detail.
“Take the meanest and most restless n****r, strip him of his clothes in front of the remaining male n****rs, the female, and the n****r infant, tar and feather him, tie each leg to a different horse faced in opposite directions, set him afire, and beat both horses to pull him apart in front of the remaining n****rs. The next step is to take a bullwhip and beat the remaining n****r males (sic) to the point of death, in front of the female and the infant. Don’t kill him, but put the fear of God in him for he can be useful in future breeding.”
The remainder of the speech deals with related actions to bring female slaves into submission, have them ‘train’ their offspring to submit to labour, reverse the relationship of dependency on the male, limit the protective tendency toward male offspring, and have females raise their male children to be dependent like them. Alone and unprotected, with the male image destroyed, the female will train her son to be mentally weak but physically strong, and her daughter to be, like herself, in a frozen psychologically independent state in the absence of male protection.
The letter goes into more methodology and detail on related matters, but you get the picture. Fake or fact, as I said earlier, it’s gist is mirrored to this day in the behaviour of too many black people in the Americas, and in the perception others have of us over our apparent inability to be fully unshackled from mental slavery. (I sometimes wonder if the wearing of bling, chains and rings; the piercings and the tattoos that so many of us flaunt, may be a kind of subliminal corporal attachment or reminder of slavery and a dependency syndrome locked into lock-step brains. By the way, who makes the jewellery and the tattoo paraphernalia, and mainly profits from them?)
In a way it doesn’t matter if the Willie Lynch letter is real or made-up, or even who wrote it. And there are semantic clues that lean in the direction of fakery. But the words and the images conjured up are based in reality and if nothing else, serve as a reminder for black people, especially in this part of the world, to take stock of ourselves, singly and collectively, our history, and the direction of our lives, and of course not only during Black History Month. Whoever Willie Lynch is/was, we can thank him for the souvenir.