We Probably Shouldn’t Teach Kids Hangman Anymore
Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash
If you are like me, then you might have fond memories of the childhood game Hangman. This game starts with a teacher, counselor, or guardian drawing the abstraction of an empty gallows on a chalkboard. This sketch is followed by a crossbeam with a narrow line hanging down from it, representing a noose.
Dashes are placed beneath the gallows representing the letters of a word or words, and children go around the room guessing letters. If they guess accurately, then the adult fills in the dashes with the correct letter. If they guess incorrectly, then a stick figure is filled in one body part at a time, beginning with the head down. When and if all the body parts are filled in, then the game ends, and implicitly, the figure on the chalkboard (metaphorically) dies.
You might never have heard this game described in such exacting terms before, and that’s because it represents a dark part of American history that our society would prefer to forget. It’s one of the small ways we teach children to be silent on our nation’s past sins, and if we want to heal as a society, we probably shouldn’t have them play games like this anymore.
The person often accredited for Hangman’s earliest iteration is Alice Bertha Gomme (probably because they are referenced to in the Wikipedia entry) in her compendium of children’s games titled The Traditional Games of England, Scotland, and Ireland. This collection of games was released in two volumes during 1894 and 1898, respectively. Gomme was a famous folklorist, and she allegedly compiled this list from both her own observations and other interviewees. In Volume One, there is a game called Birds, Beasts, and Fishes that is somewhat similar to the quintessential Hangman game, except there are no gallows on the chalkboard, and the word a player can choose is limited to that of a bird, beast, or fish.
Source: The Project Gutenberg — the cover to ‘The Traditional Games of England’
As a student of folklore, Gomme wasn’t making up this game. She was recording something that already existed. Somehow the DNA of that game transmuted into a far darker variant called Hangman, and like with much of folklore, this transition isn’t well-documented. We can only see the after-effects and retrospectively have to fill in some of the dots, or in this case, the executions.
The concept of hanging may seem unsettling to us now, but during the time immediately before The Traditional Games of England, Scotland, and Ireland’s publication, it was a common occurrence. The legal system between the 17th and early 19th century is known retrospectively in the United Kingdom as “The Bloody Code,” which prescribed the death penalty for countless offenses, some of which were relatively minor (i.e., stealing cider, cutting down young trees, etc.). Hangings were a public spectacle that could draw a huge crowd. The last “official” public execution in Great Britain took place on May, 26 in 1868. This execution was the hanging of Irish nationalist Michael Barrett and it allegedly drew in a crowd of thousands.
Source: The Irish Times — an after the fact illustration of Fenian Michael Barrett’s execution.
It’s easy to see how children might bring such a dark activity into their games. Public executions may have been banned three days after Barrett’s death under the 1868 Capital Punishment Amendment Act. Still, the practice was not abolished outright in Great Britain until 1965 and 1973 in Northern Ireland. Following the capital punishment reforms of ’68, children below the age of 17 were no longer executed, but dozens of young adults above that age were hanged.
America may have been a sea away, but it shared many similar cultural elements, including hangings. Since the year 1700, there have been 9,183 recorded hangings within the United States, and in 1895, when The Traditional Games of England, Scotland, and Ireland was published, there were 109 alone. These were similarly public spectacles that sometimes drew large crowds. When Rainey Bethea became the last person to receive a public execution in August 1936 in Owensboro, Kentucky, his death reportedly drew in 20,000 people. Rainey’s hanging was by no means an “adult” affair, and there were children in the audience. As reported by The Louisville Courier-Journal:
“The crowd came in automobiles, wagons and by hundreds of freight trains. . . . Hotels were full. In some of Owensboro’s homes all-night “hanging parties” were in progress. At the gallows, located in a vacant lot, hundreds of men, women and children had slept under the gallows’ shadow. . . .”
Source: The Boston Globe — picture of Rainey Bethea’s execution.
Public executions have fallen out of favor in most countries across the world, including the United States. We now consider them to be barbaric, yet the legacy of that trauma continues to echo in our culture, and it is mostly unresolved. The debate over state-sanctioned executions or “Capital Punishment” is still ongoing, with 22 people executed last year, and unsurprisingly that trend cuts unevenly along racial lines.
You may think that Hangman is just a game — a harmless few lines drawn on a chalkboard — but games are often how we teach children what to value, and more importantly, what behavior they should ignore. When we look at our society’s most troubling trends, it is partially through games that they are reinforced. The “boys will be boys” line in response to male aggression, for example, has often been linked to rape culture and sexual assault. The idea that male violence is natural has become a meme we are still grappling with as a society, and such a problem begins with what types of play we condone.
Hangman is a similar, albeit subtle, reminder of the types of violence we consider permissible, and the kinds of lives we think matter. As with many things within America, hangings have a very racialized context.
For many people, the noose is not an abstraction on a chalkboard, but rather an enduring symbol of terror.
The United States has executed many people during its short history (about 16,000 according to information compiled by the Death Penalty Information Center). When you comb through that data, a disproportionate amount of people who have been executed were (and are) Black. There is a famous study done by academics M. Watt Espy and John Ortiz Smykla (commonly called the “Espy file”) that attempts to chronicle all government-sponsored executions in the United States from 1608–2002. Of the executions recorded, 7,353 of those executed were Black.
That’s 50.5% of the total. Black people are roughly 13% of the current population, and even at their height, never surpassed more than 21% (note that accurate estimates remain challenging because of stigmatization). The disproportionate amount of Black people executed is a reflection of historic dehumanization. Two hundred seventy-seven instances in the Espy file come from slave revolts, which were retrospectively never justified. Even more come from the charges of murder, theft, and rape against white Slave Owners and Landowners.
Accusations of rape are particularly contentious because there is a long, bitter history of white womanhood being weaponized against Black people, particularly Black men. There is profoundly-ingrained propaganda within our culture that frames Black men as a hyper-sexualized and dangerous threat to white women. The OFTA Film Hall of Fame movie The Birth of A Nation (1915), for example, features a Black “predator” who lusts after an “innocent” white woman who our “heroes” try to valiantly save. This movie was seen by millions and is considered to be one of America’s first blockbusters.
Source: Roger Ebert — still of the film ‘The Birth of A Nation.’
The hanging we discussed earlier of Rainey Bethea ties into this trend because he was a Black man accused of rape. Rainey allegedly raped an elderly white woman and then suffocated her. We will never know if the official summary of events were what happened (though given our history, I have my doubts), but we do know that the spectacle of white womanhood was one of the reasons the hanging drew such a substantial crowd. The previous sheriff had died, and his wife Florence Thompson had inherited his job, making her the first woman executioner in United States history. As written in The Los Angeles Examiner:
“Much as she abhors the job, Mrs. Florence Thompson, Daviess County’s woman sheriff, is going to spring the trap that sends Rainey Bethea, Negro murderer, to his death…”
The attention given to Mrs. Florence for this execution is both a subversion and enforcement of the fragile white woman trope. She is defending her fellow white women against a perceived injustice, but she’s not deferring that punishment’s enforcement to a man. This context is why the emphasis is made on her “abhorring” the job because its a thing that goes against her alleged white femininity.
While Rainey’s execution happened within the confines of the United States’ perverted justice system, there were also extrajudicial murders known as “lynchings” throughout the 19th and 20th centuries (which continue to this day). These were killings perpetrated by multiple people outside the justice system — though members of the law often condoned them outright. The NAACP notes that from 1882 to 1968, there were 4,743 recorded lynchings and that 3,446 victims, or 72.7% of the total, were Black. From 1920 to 1938, the lynching of Black people was so prevalent that outside the NAACP’s headquarters was a banner with the text: “A man was lynched yesterday.”
Source: Library of Congress — the text “A Man Was Lynched Yesterday” hanging on a banner outside NAACP HQ.
For rape allegations, the white womanhood trope was the bedrock for many of these lynchings, and it was common knowledge. As activist Ida B. Wells documented extensively in her analysis, The Red Record (1895), which was one year after Gomme’s The Traditional Games of England, Scotland, and Ireland was published:
“In numerous instances where colored men have have been lynched on the charge of rape, it was positively known at the time of lynching, and indisputably proven after the victim’s death, that the relationship sustained between the man and woman was voluntary and clandestine, and that in no court of law could even the charge of assault have been successfully maintained.”
Lynchings were not just limited to rape allegations. They had an array of “justifications” — all of them rooted in instilling racialized terror among Black Americans. While lynchings took numerous forms, from burnings to gunfire, hangings remained viscerally attached to the practice, and because of this fact, the noose has left a scar in our collective memory. All across the United States are stories of hanging trees where lynchings, both real and imagined, took place, and many have even become the subject of modern-day folklore.
For example, in Brazoria, Texas, a tree still referred to fondly by some as the Masonic Oak is the alleged site where two slaves were hung to death. As a ghost story, people continue to claim these slave’s spirits haunt the surrounding landscape. Ironically, the story of the Hanging Tree (and the two slaves who were unjustly killed there) has been overshadowed by another tale about the Masonic Lodge’s founding. People prefer to remember the Lodge’s story, while the former account has been obscured by legend. There are thousands of stories like this across America. We may have ignored much of this history in school, but it still reemerges in our ghost stories and childhood games.
Source: Yan Lee’s Big Tree Studio — an ink illustration of the 400-year-old tree.
The noose is burned into the American consciousness as a symbol of terror, and to this day, people will use it as an act of intimidation against Black people. Shortly after the National Museum of African American History opened in 2016, several nooses were left on the National Mall in Washington, DC. Laminated cards of Black victims of police brutality were recently found tied to nooses on a tree in Milwaukee’s Riverside Park. And of course, lynchings still happen both at the hands of the police (e.g., George Floyd) and private citizens (e.g., Ahmaud Arbery).
The grim history represented in Hangman is fresh, and so it seems a little strange that we would reenact this trauma as a game in classrooms across America.
Children are not oblivious to their history. I was struck the other day when a teacher remarked on Twitter (under the handle @queenyennifer_) how their 8-year-old student was aware of much of the history I have just addressed, writing:
“Today I was left speechless by an 8 year old, who politely told me that it was inappropriate to play hangman with them because of the lynchings of black men and the current state of the world and you know what? He was totally correct. I’m bringing him a prize tomorrow.”
We should not pretend like children are ignorant of the more pernicious aspects of our culture. Games can be both “light” diversions as well as the enforcers of social norms. Children are taught concepts such as responsibility, marriage, or beauty norms on the playground (or Zoom chat) well before being taught the history surrounding them.
What socials norms do you think Hangman enforces?
I loved playing Hangman as a kid. I must have played this game hundreds of times throughout my life. I also didn’t learn about the history in this article until well into adulthood, and if you are like many white Americans, then you probably didn’t either. Hangman seems to be more indicative of our ability to trivialize and ignore our cruel past than to learn from it. This form of behavior hasn’t helped us grow as a society, and it’s time to set it aside.
If you are considering playing this game, maybe think of something else instead. Some teachers currently employ a version where they draw an apple tree instead of a gallows and erase an apple for each incorrect letter. In another version, the teacher draws a snowman one piece at a time.
It’s not difficult to rework this game into literally anything other than a man hanging to their death from a rope.
This point might sound like a small criticism to make given the more massive battles we have to fight, but if we want to build a more tolerant future, we should not trivialize these lynchings and hangings. We should place them in their proper historical context, and part of that work means removing the tools we have used to ignore our past.
It’s only through this work that we can honestly face the weight of history.