JENKINSVILLE, S.C. - From the time his son was old enough to understand, Kamau Marcharia has been telling Ramon the story of an ancestor who was tied to the bumper of a Model T Ford and dragged to his death.
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Lynching is part of black Southerners' heritage.
But Mr. Marcharia was not prepared for the call that came three years ago when Ramon and three other black boys got into a fight with a white boy at middle school and were summoned to court - to answer charges of lynching.
"I didn't even know there was a law like that," the veteran civil rights activist says. "When I hear that term, psychologically I cannot get that out of my mind, the picture of some horrible event."
South Carolina's lynching law is the only one of four - the others are in California, Virginia and West Virginia - that is still routinely used. It was enacted to end the state's long history of white vigilante justice against blacks.
Today in South Carolina, however, blacks are most often the ones charged with lynching, defined as any act of violence by two or more people against another, regardless of race. According to an Associated Press analysis of crime statistics, black South Carolinians are charged with lynching twice as often as whites. Though they make up just 30 percent of the state's population, blacks account for 63 percent of the lynching charges.
Prosecutors and police argue that no racial profiling is involved. They point out that blacks are charged with other violent crimes more often than whites. But it's the use of the word lynching that bothers Mr. Marcharia and others.
"Obviously, the law has outlived its purpose," says J. Wayne Flynt, a professor of Southern history at Auburn University. "Its intent was to stop extralegal violence, essentially aimed at blacks."
FOR MANY, the term "lynching" conjures images of black men, accused of some real or perceived crime, pulled from jail cells by white mobs, strung up from trees and mutilated. When South Carolina's Legislature passed its law in 1951, it was responding to just such a case - the highly publicized murder of Willie Earle, who was dragged out of jail by a white mob and gunned down in retaliation for the death of a cabbie.
On Feb. 15, 1947, Thomas W. Brown was found outside Pickens, about 500 yards from his cab. He had been stabbed three times and robbed. Mr. Earle was arrested the next day and jailed.
On Feb. 17, a mob of white men - many wearing taxi drivers' caps - stormed the jail and took Mr. Earle. He was found about two hours later in neighboring Greenville County; he had been beaten, stabbed and shot in the face with a shotgun.
Then-Gov. Strom Thurmond ordered a vigorous investigation, and 31 men were charged. Despite confessions from 26 of them, all were acquitted.
SOME RECENT LYNCHING charges in South Carolina have involved brutal attacks, and the penalties for convictions are stiff - up to 40 years for first-degree lynching, involving a death, and 20 years for second-degree.
In 1996, a white couple in Clarendon County were charged with lynching. Authorities said they tied a 9-year-old black boy to a tree, shot a gun past his head, punched and kicked him and tied a belt around his neck until he passed out. They were convicted of aggravated assault and served less than two years.
Mr. Marcharia has approached legislators about amending the lynching law to better reflect the word's historical meaning, but to no avail.
"That law was passed, in my judgment, to make sure that African-Americans, two generations from now or two decades from now, will lose the memory of their history, what happened to them," he says. "That kids born in that period of time will see lynching as a fistfight when we know that lynching is murder and killing, burning people and evil."
