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Let's look at the context of the noose for whether it's a hate crime. I'm familiar with the recent case in Louisiana that prompted this question. A particular shade tree was used for congregating by white students, some black athletes decided to use the tree and deliberately break an unspoken segregation line. There were no rules in place saying those kids couldn't stand under that tree. The tree, on school property, was allowed to students. So the students stood around under it and conversed. No rules broken. Only a social line.

When six black kids took shade under a forbidden tree, retaliation was a noose hung as a message to them, a reminder of the bad old days in the fifties and sixties when the Ku Klux Klan used to hang uppity black people who dared exercise the rights they had as citizens. There is no Jim Crow law in place any more to stop the black kids from standing under the tree. Those boys were living in the 21st century.

That noose was an attempt at intimidation, one that worked in provoking a fight. Now, throughout history, high school boys have fought over this and that. The kids got into a brawl over it because that was a real threat, a death threat in fact.

I've had death threats before in my life. Young men don't respond well to death threats, least of all when they were already aware that they were fighting the same discrimination their fathers and grandfathers did. They chose to stand under the tree. They faced the racial conflict in a nonviolent way when they did - and their opponents replied symbolically.

No, I do not think displaying a noose should be rendered illegal, considered a hate crime whenever it's done. In that context with the Jena Six, it certainly was. Because of what the Jena Six had done, because it was an answer specifically to black kids doing something that theoretically any student could do and crossing a line that's only social, not legal, that threat should be taken seriously as a real threat.

Symbols mean what they mean in context. If I display a noose outside my house on October 31, no one is going to take that as a death threat. The reaction to that symbol is going to be that children will accurately interpret it to mean that I probably have some buckets of candy to give away inside the door. They'd be right. That's what I'd mean by it.

But if my black neighbor's kids cut across my yard and the night after it happened I went and hung a noose on the fence, I would be telling that neighbor and the

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