Looking at large crowds of screaming Trump enthusiasts and reading their racially inflammatory comments online evokes more and more disgust toward those who seek to downplay or shove aside the danger they represent to many of us. To those who seem surprised that this is happening in the here and now after we polished our global image by electing a black president twice (as if somehow racism was exorcised from the American psyche by Obama’s election), I ask that you open your eyes and attempt to see what I see, and feel what I feel.
Deadly racial vitriol is nothing new, and has not been expelled from our collective national psyche. Trump talks out of the side of his neck about terrorism, all the while pointing fingers at Muslims. Yet he and his cadre never mention the history of terror unleashed in this nation’s recent history (and present) on its black citizenry. Trump’s recent excursion to the National Museum of African American History and Culture made a mockery of every artifact it houses.
Like my Jewish brethren and sisters, I was raised to never forget. As a child, I learned the meaning of Strange Fruit early on.
The photograph above is a detail from a postcard widely circulated after the lynching of 16-year-old Lige Daniels in Texas (here’s a link to the whole disturbing photo). The image draws me back, time and time again. Looking at those faces makes me wonder if any of those men are still alive. How many grew up to have children to whom they passed on their complete and total indifference to black suffering, and their glee observing black pain? I see their reflections flickering in the eyes of Dylann Roof.
I refuse to look away. As long as we look away we will never heal. We will never change.
Too often, even those of us who talk of lynching don’t speak the names of those who died at the hands of racist terrorists. We do not know them, and we do not seek to know them. They are simply black bodies, burned and mutilated by “a mob,” and we feel sad, and move on. We do not know their faces before their gruesome demise. We know little of their lives and only the fact of their deaths.
Meet Wyatt Outlaw.
The lynching of Wyatt Outlaw on the courthouse square in Graham in 1870 continues to reverberate across the generations. The consequences for North Carolina were profound, leading to the first impeachment of a governor in U.S. history. Outlaw’s death, like that of State Sen. J. W. (“Chicken”) Stephens in the basement of the courthouse in Caswell County, in part precipitated the “Kirk-Holden War.”
Carole Troxler, Elon University professor, has examined the historical record concerning Outlaw. Biographical details, gleaned from Congressional investigations into the 1870-71 Ku Klux Klan “outrages” and transcript of the impeachment trial of Gov. W. W. Holden, are spare. Outlaw, likely the offspring of white merchant Chesley Faucett and Jemimah Phillips, a free black, served in the Union army, in the 2nd Regiment U.S. Colored Cavalry, first in Virginia with a later posting in Texas along the Rio Grande. On his return home, he opened a woodworking shop on North Main Street in Graham, repairing wagons and making coffins, in addition to specialty trimwork. (Troxler believes it likely that he trained with Thomas Day of Caswell County.) In 1866 he attended the second freedmen’s convention in Raleigh and soon after organized the Union League in Alamance as well as a school and church. Gov. Holden in 1868 appointed him as a town commissioner in Graham and he was elected to the post the following year. That board in 1869 organized an armed night patrol in response to the activities of the Klan.
On Feb. 26, 1870, Outlaw became the target for a Klan mob of 70-100, selected because he was an effective leader, able to work with both races. Seized in his house (over the cries of his young son), Outlaw was hanged from the limb of an elm tree which pointed to the courthouse. His mouth was slashed and a note pinned to his body: “Beware you guilty both white and black.” Another target of intimidation left town that night. Gov. Holden, acting on authority of the Shoffner Act, declared Alamance and Caswell to be in a state of insurrection, setting in motion a sequence of events leading to his impeachment and removal in 1871. In 1873 eighteen men were charged with the murder but ex-Gov. Holden, among others, pleaded for their release and charges were dropped. Albion Tourgee used details from Outlaw’s life in composite characters in his Reconstruction novels.
Outlaw was recently given a memorial service near the Alamance County Courthouse in Graham, North Carolina.
A racially charged crowd hung Wyatt Outlaw from a tree until his last breath.
None of the hooded men involved in the lynching of the former slave, who was then serving on the Graham Town Commission, would ever serve prison time.
“It was murder,” said the Rev. Frank Dew, a member of the Peace and Justice Task Force of the Salem Presbytery, the local group of Presbyterian (U.S.A.) churches, which will hold a “memorializing” service Tuesday on the grounds near the Alamance County Courthouse, where the lynching took place. The service will take place after the group’s annual meeting.
The committee learned of Outlaw while reading “Just Mercy,” a New York Times bestseller by upcoming Bryan Series speaker Bryan Stevenson, the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, an effort aimed at helping people considered in the margins of society.
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As part of his research, Stevenson listed more than 4,000 lynchings of African Americans between 1877 and 1950.
For a detailed study of this history that is still being uncovered, a suggested read is On the Courthouse Lawn: Confronting the Legacy of Lynching in the Twenty-first Century by Sherrilyn A. Ifill, who is currently president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.
Nearly 5,000 black Americans were lynched between 1890 and 1960. Over forty years later, Sherrilyn Ifill’s On the Courthouse Lawn examines the numerous ways that this racial trauma still resounds across the United States.While the lynchings and their immediate aftermath were devastating, the little-known contemporary consequences, such as the marginalization of political and economic development for black Americans, are equally pernicious.
On the Courthouse Lawn investigates how the lynchings implicated average white citizens, some of whom actively participated in the violence while many others witnessed the lynchings but did nothing to stop them. Ifill observes that this history of complicity has become embedded in the social and cultural fabric of local communities, who either supported, condoned, or ignored the violence. She traces the lingering effects of two lynchings in Maryland to illustrate how ubiquitous this history is and issues a clarion call for American communities with histories of racial violence to be proactive in facing this legacy today.
Inspired by South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, as well as by techniques of restorative justice, Ifill provides concrete ideas to help communities heal, including placing gravestones on the unmarked burial sites of lynching victims, issuing public apologies, establishing mandatory school programs on the local history of lynching, financially compensating those whose family homes or businesses were destroyed in the aftermath of lynching, and creating commemorative public spaces. Because the contemporary effects ofracial violence are experienced most intensely in local communities, Ifill argues that reconciliation and reparation efforts must also be locally based in order to bring both black and white Americans together in an efficacious dialogue.
A landmark book, On the Courthouse Lawn is a much-needed and urgent road map for communities finally confronting lynching’s long shadow by embracing pragmatic reconciliation and reparation efforts.
Pattrice Jones wrote a review that resonated with me, because as a child I lived in Princess Anne, Maryland.
Everything happens somewhere.
In 1933, in the small town of Princess Anne on the Lower Eastern Shore of the state of Maryland, hundreds of local citizens stormed the county jail, seizing and stabbing George Armwood (a black man accused of attacking a white woman) before dragging him down the stairs, his head thumping on every step. The crowd outside joined in kicking, punching, and mutilating the body of the unconscious man. Insensate but probably still alive, Armwood was then dragged through the streets, hung from a tree, and beaten with sticks. The white mob then carried Armwood’s body to the corner of Prince and William streets, drenched him in gasoline, and set him on fire. His charred body was displayed, for more than a day, in a lumberyard near the Washington Hotel. As Sherrlyn Ifill reports, “Black residents, particularly children on their way to school, saw Armwood’s body as it lay in the lumberyard on that Thursday morning.” Seventy years later, one of those children recalled the day, saying “What could you do? You went on to school.”
I have walked down Prince and William streets. I know well the white facade of the self-consciously historical Washington Hotel, which architecturally asserts pride in its continuity with the past. I wonder if that’s the same lumberyard, just across the alley. The first time I walked through the town, the nearest to the rural property to which I had just moved, I felt decidedly uneasy. Something about the forced and not nearly successful historical charm created an atmosphere of smothering silence. Without knowing anything of the incident just recounted, I said to my companion, “Something awful happened here.” For some reason, I felt compelled to whisper.
We often use the word “unspeakable” when we cannot find words to explain or express our repugnance for extreme or sexualized violence. But the word is literally true for lynching, as the details of these community orgies tend to become literally unspeakable in the public spaces where they actually happened, with white perpetrators and eye-witnesses pretending innocent unawareness and black community members not daring to speak of what they know except to each other. And yet the howls of the mobs and the cut-off cries of their victims reverberate for generations, perhaps even more strongly because they are neither voiced nor acknowledged in the public life of the community. In On the Courthouse Lawn: Confronting the Legacy of Twenty-First Century Lynching, law professor Sherrilyn Ifill traces the reverberations of late-date lynchings in three Eastern Shore communities, thereby doing a real service to those communities while at the same time demonstrating her thesis that, because every lynching was a local act, perpetrated by local whites in order to terrorize local people of color, only truly local restorative justice processes — whether these include conversations, reparations, or public commemorations — can begin to mitigate the ongoing damage.
Some of you may also be familiar with James Allen’s book, and the online lynching photo site Without Sanctuary.
Allen’s quest to collect photos and postcards of lynchings is detailed in depth in a Los Angeles Times article titled “An Obsessive Quest to Make People See.”
He has not had an easy time of it. Allen has been applauded but also harshly criticized for making a coffee table book of this history. He gives lectures, and the article describes the reactions at one:
A woman in the second row, her cheeks streaked with tears, stares at the ceiling.
"Why?" Allen says. "People ask all the time: 'Why? Why did you collect these horrific photos?' "
He clears his throat, adjusts his glasses. He runs a hand through his sparse blond hair. "In humble admiration of the work of Emmett Till's mother," he says, referring to Mamie Till, who insisted on an open-casket funeral after her son was lynched in August 1955, to show the world what lynching looked like. "Putting a face on murder and racial hatred in America for the entire world to see, we published this book. For the need to have an outlet for my own disgust and anger at the status quo, I have relentlessly pursued these photos. With every image acquired, and every face of the gawkers and killers that is brought to light, I sense a quieting of the hounds that have dogged me since childhood."
His voice thickens.
"For every victim that lies pasted in some racist family's photo album," he says, "or stored in a trunk with grandma and grandpa's Klan robe, or still pinned to the wall of a service station in some holdout sorry-ass little town--if we can acquire and place their photos in an accurate, respectful context, identify and record them for the first time, I feel some slight awareness of what is meant by resurrection."
As the word "resurrection" floats in the muggy air, hovers like a line of music, Allen acknowledges finally what drives him, as a Southerner, as a white man, as a human being. "Sometimes, when working with these images, I search the faces of the whites. I tremble with anger at the legacy they left me to claim."
He grips the lectern.
"I know that, possibly, in another time, it could be my face fixed in the photographer's chemicals. Gloating so stupidly. Gazing out at me now." He takes a step back, his glasses fogged with tears, a look of relief on his face. He's explained himself, at last. He's made them, and maybe himself, see.
The group that has refused to allow the history of racial terror lynchings to be forgotten is the
Equal Justice Initiative, headed by
Bryan Stevenson. Their website presents a wealth of information on issues of racial justice.
After the end of slavery and the premature end of Reconstruction, Southern whites who had fought to keep slavery regained power of their state governments. The convict leasing and sharecropping systems were used to restore white economic dominance, and discriminatory laws deprived black people of political rights. Violent intimidation was the method of enforcement. Lynching emerged as a vicious tool of racial control in the South after the Civil War, as a way to reestablish white supremacy and suppress black civil rights. At the end of the 19th century, Southern lynch mobs targeted and terrorized African Americans with impunity.
Lynching of African Americans was terrorism, a widely supported phenomenon used to enforce racial subordination and segregation. Lynchings were violent and public events that traumatized black people throughout the country and were largely tolerated by state and federal officials. This was not “frontier justice” carried out by a few marginalized vigilantes or extremists. Instead, many African Americans who were never accused of any crime were tortured and murdered in front of picnicking spectators (including elected officials and prominent citizens) for bumping into a white person, or wearing their military uniforms after World War I, or not using the appropriate title when addressing a white person. People who participated in lynchings were celebrated and acted with impunity, purchasing victims' body parts as souvenirs and posing for photographs with hanging corpses to mail to loved ones as postcards.
Lynching profoundly impacted race relations in this country and shaped the contemporary geographic, political, social, and economic conditions of African Americans. Most importantly, lynching reinforced a narrative of racial difference and a legacy of racial inequality that is readily apparent in our criminal justice system today. Mass incarceration, racially biased capital punishment, excessive sentencing, disproportionate sentencing of racial minorities, and police abuse of people of color reveal problems in American society that were shaped by the terror era.
EJI's new report documents how African Americans who served in the military were specially targeted for racial terror lynchings.
My own family history taught me that racists have no respect for black men in uniform, since an angry group of white men almost killed my father on his way back to the Tuskegee Airman base during World War II.
On August 18, 1898, Private James Neely, an African American veteran who had recently returned from the Spanish American War, proudly donned his Army uniform for a stroll through Hampton, Georgia. By the day’s end, Private Neely had been tragically murdered by a lynch mob.
EJI collaborated with director Julie Zammarchi and acclaimed television, film, and stage actor Chris Chalk to create this 3-minute video about the lynching of Private Neely, which mirrors the violent killings of countless other African American veterans. The piece is based on EJI's original research, which is detailed in the report Lynching in America: Targeting Black Veterans.
Inspired to defend their country and pursue greater opportunity, African Americans have served in the US Military for generations. But instead of being treated as equal members of society upon their return from military service, thousands of black veterans were accosted, attacked or lynched between the end of the Civil War and the post-World War II era.
This project is part of EJI's campaign to recognize victims of lynching. We will be collecting soil from lynching sites and creating a memorial that acknowledges the horrors of racial injustice.
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Public acknowledgment of mass violence is essential not only for victims and survivors, but also for perpetrators and bystanders who suffer from trauma and damage related to their participation in systematic violence and dehumanization. Yet most lynchings, and their victims, have never been publicly recognized.
To create greater awareness and understanding about racial terror lynchings, and to begin a necessary conversation that advances truth and reconciliation, EJI is working with communities to commemorate and recognize the traumatic era of lynching by collecting soil from lynching sites across Alabama.
More communities throughout the country are joining with EJI to participate in our Lynching Marker Project. The project is part of EJI's effort to recognize the victims of lynching by erecting historical markers that acknowledge the horrors of racial terror lynchings.
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EJI believes that truthfully acknowledging this history is vital to healing and reconciliation. As part of its effort to help towns, cities, and states confront and recover from tragic histories of racial violence and terrorism, EJI is joining with communities to install historical markers at the sites of lynchings.
Most recently, EJI unveiled an historical marker that documents the lynchings of seven victims in Letohatchee, Alabama, and recognizes 14 documented lynchings that took place in Lowndes County. Dozens participated in the dedication ceremony at Rehobeth Missionary Church in Letohatchee, braving the rain to pray and reflect together on the history of racial terrorism in Lowndes County.
There’s an ugly stream of racism that wends its way through our cities and towns—urban, suburban, and rural—which currently has a font in our White House, occupied by the bigot-in-chief, elected by people who chose to shrug off the open racism or loudly deny that it is a Republican feature. Until we as a nation come to grips with the past and the deplorable present, we will continue to be awash in hate and fear.
I see too many examples like the one pictured below. “Joking” about ropes is the same as joking about ovens.
Chauncey DeVega wrote a piece recently addressing white Trump voters:
At this moment in history, this means that people like you who voted for and support Trump are racists who have made a decision to do harm to your fellow Americans. You should make peace with this fact and own its moral and ethical implications. Unfortunately, there are many people like you who instead of being ashamed are feeling quite proud. You will soon learn with Trump in office how racism does not just hurt black and brown folks; it can and often does hurt white people, too. I hope you enjoy the lesson.
There should be no pride in embracing hate. I take pride in working to fight it and eradicate it. I will continue to highlight groups and organizations who don’t cover up the past, and who challenge us to build a better future.
As I sit here and write this painful Sunday sermon I am listening to Nina Simone, whose birthday was this month.
As I turn age 70 this year, I know I will not live to see an America cleansed of racial hate and terror. But when I die I’ll rest easy knowing I’ve done my best to help with the clean-up—and that I refused to be a part of the cover-up.