Drive down Uschak Road in Derry Township, and a wooden shape can loom from a front lawn. It rises high and thin, with a dangling rope knotted in a loop.
It isn’t a flagpole.
It is a gallows.
No one put it there as a threat. Bryan Piper put it up himself for Halloween.
But that holiday was several years ago, and the hangman’s noose still dangles.
It has started to draw attention.
Piper says it isn’t racist, blaming a KDKA reporter for raising the issue.
“She needs to go back to school and study history,” he said. “When people were lynched, they threw the rope over a tree branch. They weren’t taken to the gallows.”
To be precise, a constructed gallows has seldom been part of a lynching. Piper is right about that.
He is wrong about the rest.
The image he describes — a rope over a tree branch — is the stereotype.
Lynching is something else entirely.
It was Emmett Till, a 14-year-old boy beaten until he was unrecognizable, his body dumped in a river with a fan blade wired to his neck. It was civil rights workers murdered for helping people register to vote. It was Isadore Banks of Arkansas, a Black man burned alive for being successful. It was Willie Howard, a teenager forced to choose between a bullet and a river.
The point was terror — carried out blatantly and excused as punishment.
The gallows might not be a snapshot of that history, but it echoes it.
Piper’s other dismissal is all too familiar. He left it up “just for laughs.”
It was just a joke.
Here’s the thing: Jokes are funny.
Jokes have context. They only land for people who understand what you’re trying to say.
You have to take responsibility if you put a “joke” in public and people read it as something else. That is especially true when it is an easily recognized symbol many people would find threatening rather than funny.
Derry Township Supervisor Jim Prohaska says the gallows isn’t violating any ordinances. And one could say it is Piper’s First Amendment right to tell a joke or make a statement in his yard with whatever wood and rope he wants.
But what might be considered creepy fun in October reads differently in March.
Piper might have every right to his front yard joke.
But no one is required to laugh.
