“My mind went back to what my ancestors went through being hung from trees with nooses around their neck,” Karla Scott told the Bristol Borough council in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, this month. The cause was five figures wrapped in black garbage bags and duct tape, hanging from a tree in the borough, each with a rope around its neck.
The borough sent an inspector the next day. Council President Ralph DiGuiseppe told The Philadelphia Inquirer that the homeowner refused to take the display down and that Bristol has no rule that would make them. The homeowner told FOX 29 the decorations were only Halloween displays with “no other agenda” and said they were “sorry if it offended anyone.” The display is staying through Halloween, which falls on Saturday.
Bristol is one address in a pattern that repeats every October on both sides of the border: a hanging figure goes up, Black neighbors say what it is, and the argument that follows is almost never about whether the prop is frightening. It is about who gets to decide what a rope around a neck means.
What the rope meant
The Equal Justice Initiative has documented more than 4,400 racial terror lynchings in the United States between Reconstruction and World War II, including 4,075 of Black people in 12 Southern states between 1877 and 1950. Its researchers describe them as “terrorism, a widely supported campaign to enforce racial subordination and segregation,” not the work of marginalized extremists. Victims were tortured and killed in front of “picnicking spectators (including elected officials and prominent citizens),” often over trivial slights, and those who took part were celebrated and acted with impunity.
Congress did not make lynching a federal crime until March 29, 2022, when the Emmett Till Antilynching Act was signed. More than 200 earlier attempts had failed, the first filed in 1900 by Rep. George Henry White of North Carolina.
That is the memory a hanging figure in a yard draws on, and it is why Black residents tend to react in the first hour, before any debate about intent begins. The Bucks County NAACP put it this way in its statement on Bristol: “For Black Americans, this imagery carries a painful historical significance rooted in lynching and racial terror. While we recognize that Halloween decorations are often intended to frighten or shock, intent does not erase impact.”
The same scene, in different towns
Bristol is not unusual in how it unfolded. In Lansing, Illinois, in 2018, a 15-year-old found a Black mannequin hanging from a tree with a rope around its neck on her way to school. Her mother called police, and an officer told her that because it was Halloween he did not think it was offensive. The homeowner, asked to remove it, said “I have friends who are Black.” Officers eventually made the family take it down.
In Chesapeake, Virginia, in 2019, police called a hanging replica body insensitive and said they would speak to the homeowner. In Cartersville, Georgia, in 2023, a figure in brown gloves hung from a noose. Dexter Benning, president of the Bartow County NAACP, said the gloves made the hands look brown and noted the county’s own history of hangings. A neighbor pulled the figure down. The family, who said it was a ghoul their children called “Mr. Creepy,” hung it back up and cited their First Amendment rights. Police who were called said no law had been broken.
The best-known version of the argument is older than any of these. In 2006, nooses were found hanging from a tree at Jena High School in Louisiana. The principal recommended expulsion for the three white students responsible. The superintendent and school board overruled him. “Adolescents play pranks,” the superintendent said. “I don’t think it was a threat against anybody.” The local district attorney said the students “should be ashamed of what they unleashed on this town” but found no statute he could use to prosecute them.
That gap is what produced the first noose laws. In 2008, Connecticut, New York and Louisiana passed statutes against displaying a noose to intimidate. Louisiana’s makes it a crime “with the intent to intimidate any person or group of persons” to display a hangman’s noose on another’s property or a public place, with up to a year in prison and a $5,000 fine. Virginia, California and Maryland have also criminalized noose displays. In these laws, the word that does the work is intent.
Canada’s version
Canadian neighbors have had the same fight. In Maple Ridge, British Columbia, in 2020, a display with two life-sized dummies hanging by nooses drew a post from former broadcaster Tamara Taggart, who wrote that a friend’s Black sons lived nearby and saw it every day. Its creator, Kelvin Meier, said: “This has no racial aspect whatsoever, absolutely not.” In Kelowna in 2021, a mannequin hung from a noose beside a Confederate flag. An anonymous Black resident said, “We all know what this is.” Kelowna RCMP Inspector Adam MacIntosh said the symbols “only serve to fuel hatred and division,” and Mayor Colin Basran said there was “no place in Kelowna for this kind of racist imagery.”
In Port Hope, Ontario, last October, a neighbor named Jordan Knight told Today’s Northumberland that “black people were noosed, sorry lynched and hung on trees and left to rot.” Port Hope Police said “there was no racial intent” and that the owner had repositioned the decoration and apologized. Knight said it was back up the next day.
Canadian courts have treated a noose as more than a prop. In February 2010, a cross with a noose on it was burned outside a home in Poplar Grove, Nova Scotia, where a Black man lived with his partner and their five children. A man was later found guilty of inciting hatred, in what the Crown said was the first time a cross burning was recognized as a hate crime in Canada.
On June 18, 2026, Parliament went further. The Combatting Hate Act, Bill C-9, added the noose to a short list of symbols, alongside two Nazi symbols and those of listed terrorist entities, that it is a crime to display in a public place while wilfully promoting hatred against an identifiable group. Senator Wanda Thomas Bernard, who moved the amendment, told the Senate the noose is “a literal tool of execution” and “universally recognized as a primary symbol of White supremacy, anti-Black racism and the history of lynching.” She added that “its psychological impact is equivalent to the Nazi symbols already targeted by Bill C-9.” A spokesperson for Justice Minister Sean Fraser said the noose “has a specific and painful history as a symbol of anti-Black hate, intimidation and violence,” The Globe and Mail reported. The provision took effect July 18.
The offence is narrow by design. Section 319(2.2) of the Criminal Code applies only to someone who “wilfully promotes hatred,” which the Code defines as “an emotion of an intense and extreme nature that is clearly associated with vilification and detestation.” It carries a maximum of two years in prison. Displays for journalism, education or art that are not contrary to the public interest are exempt, as are displays made in good faith to expose and remove hatred. And no prosecution can start without the Attorney General’s consent.
Three arguments, one test
The first argument is the NAACP’s: a symbol’s history does not depend on the person holding the rope. The Senate made a version of it when it put the noose in the same category as Nazi insignia.
The second is the homeowner’s, and it is also a legal claim. The Freedom Forum, a First Amendment education group, says government cannot restrict Halloween decorations simply because people find them too scary, gruesome or controversial. A display loses protection only if it is a true threat, meaning a serious threat of violence that the speaker knew or should have known would cause fear. Homeowners’ associations and private landlords, which the First Amendment does not bind, can set their own rules. In Houston last year, police found no crime when a homeowner hung red-hatted mannequins from a noose as a comment on immigration enforcement, and a civil rights attorney, Randall Kallinen, said: “It’s all freedom of speech.”
The third argument is about how to draw the line without a law that could be turned on other speech. First Amendment instructor David L. Hudson Jr. has written that noose bans raise concerns about viewpoint discrimination, citing the Supreme Court’s ruling in R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul against ordinances that singled out cross burning and similar displays. The closest precedent is Virginia v. Black (2003). The Court upheld a state ban on burning a cross with intent to intimidate, but struck down a provision that let a jury presume intimidation from the burning alone. Justice Clarence Thomas, in dissent, wrote that “in our culture, cross burning has almost invariably meant lawlessness and understandably instills in its victims well-grounded fear of physical violence.”
Read side by side, the American statutes, the Supreme Court and the new Canadian provision make the same choice: a noose can be a crime, but only when someone meant it to terrorize. The NAACP’s statement, “intent does not erase impact,” describes the harm that criminal law, by design, does not measure. Whatever the law says about a homeowner’s mind, the person down the street has already seen the rope.
In Bristol, no ordinance applies and the homeowner says the display stays through Saturday. In Canada, a first test of the noose provision would begin with a decision no one has yet made public: whether an Attorney General will consent to a charge.
Have your say