A 17-year-old of Gurnee is scheduled to appear October 23 in Lake County Circuit Court on a disorderly conduct charge related to a noose hanging from his rearview mirror. Police in suburban South Elgin, meanwhile, are investigating a noose that upset an African American construction worker in a Home Depot store opening next month. Now Chicago Public Radio has learned of a noose that disturbed a young family on the city’s Northwest Side. Chip Mitchell reports.

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Ambi: Shopping carts in parking lot.

24-year-old Angelita Kent was parking here at this supermarket in Chicago’s Irving Park neighborhood with her husband and kids last month.

Through the windows of another car, they noticed a miniature noose hanging from the rearview mirror.

They pulled out a camera and took pictures.

And, when the driver returned, Kent says they exchanged a few tense words before he drove off.

KENT: It didn’t seem as if he felt bad or any type of remorse for having it there.

Kent says the noose reminded her of her grandmother who moved to Chicago from Georgia in the 1950s.

KENT: She had seen friends of hers that were actually lynched. So I learned about it firsthand from a family member. And the way in which she spoke about it — it was in tears. And it’s not fun to tell your children what happened. It’s not fun for your children to ask you.

Kent’s family took down the car’s license plate. We tracked it to a 48-year-old man who lives a few blocks north of the supermarket. But when we visited, he wouldn’t answer questions about the noose or the photos that showed him getting in the car.

MAN: If I wanted to talk, wouldn’t I be talking to you? (car starts)

The Chicago events are among more than a dozen incidents involving nooses across the country over the last month. Mark Potok of the Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center sees a backlash.

POTOK: If you look around, for instance, at postings on mainstream newspaper Web sites, you see an awful lot of white resentment really boiling around what happened in Jena.

That’s the Louisiana town where nooses in a schoolyard fueled a conflict that led to attempted-murder charges against six African American students and to a national outcry accusing the authorities of race discrimination.

POTOK: But I think there’s something more going on, which is that the noose is coming to replace, in the minds of the public, the burning cross. Different people, for whatever reason they want to express these kinds of feelings, choose the noose to express them.  

And that choice carries weight in a country where roughly 4,000 African Americans were lynched during the 19th and 20th centuries.

The law, nevertheless, doesn’t always protect people from menacing speech. That’s according to Colleen Connell of the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois.

CONNELL: If there’s conduct and that conduct amounts to actual violence or a threat or harassment, that is very likely actionable in a court of law. If it’s an employment context, it might be considered employment discrimination. If it’s in a school context, school authorities can take disciplinary action. There is less protection against offensive speech in a public place, because the First Amendment and similar protections for free speech in the Illinois constitution provide a wide latitude of speech, including symbolic speech.

Symbolic, Connell says, like dangling a noose from the rearview mirror.

But Cook County Bar Association President Carl Turpin likens that expression to hollering “Fire!” in a crowded theater.

TURPIN: The speech is pretty clear: “You black African Americans as a race of people should be hung at will.” Those people that do that may know the type of reaction that it would cause.

Turpin calls on authorities to use the Illinois Hate Crimes Act on anyone who hangs a noose. That includes, he says, the man who disturbed Angelita Kent and her family.

I’m Chip Mitchell, Chicago Public Radio.