In July, a report from then LSU professor (and now RAND consultant) Jhacova Williams detailed a consistent connection between past lynchings and lower voter registration among Black people in the journal the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics. “Black Americans who reside in counties in the South where there was a higher number of lynchings from 1882 to 1930 have lower voter registration today” concludes the RAND press release that also announces Williams joined the RAND Corp. The paper is called “Historical Lynchings and Contemporary Voting Behavior of Blacks” and can be found easily if you Google it.
Think about this for a second. Racist activity 100 years ago affects voter registration numbers today in those counties. This paper lit a fire among the little text group that arose among those Albany State students with whom I had worked in the Georgia Senate Runoff last winter. I have already mentioned how this group was determined to protect their historic victory in election Rev. Warnock to the U.S. Senate. But this paper really pissed them off. It became the second driving force in our efforts there this summer — and the central foci for our plans for moving forward.
So you might get a sense why Georgia, despite being 4th in population in the states we are targeting consistently had the second most volunteers out every week. Yes, they had been doing voter outreach longer but they also had a higher purpose.
As the old white guy among these young African Americans, it answered the question from other white guys, what does our (racist) past have to do with me? Fear lingers. Fear has consequences. Racism may be learned but fear last (at least) 100 years. We are, indeed, responsible for the actions of our grand and great grand parents as long as we let it linger.
Or, as Williams says, “Considering that lynchings were aimed at preventing blacks from voting in the past, the findings indicate that the historical lynching environment created voting norms among blacks that persists today.” And we have to do something.
In one sense, I have always known this. My parents were civil rights activists. They co-founded Bridge Builders in the middle 1960s with the minister of the Metropolitan Baptist Church in Cocoa and his wife. And they founded Bridge Builders because the Volusia County (the one above where we lived and the home of Daytona Beach) School Board was putting air conditioning in the white schools but would not pay for it in the black schools. The black churches had approached the school board and asked if they could pay (meaning raise the funds) to put air conditioning in the black schools, and — having received it — raised the funds. When they went back, the school board demanded half the funds they had raised be given over to the school board to be used how they saw fit. Obviously, they were not going to use those funds to benefit those for whom they were raised.
In a sense, events overtook what was at the time the largest civil rights group in Central Florida. Integration in Brevard County, where I grew up, was achieved by tearing down the black schools and replacing them with brand new facilities. I went to a brand new elementary school (needed, in part from the population growth around the Apollo project), an old white junior high and a brand new high school that replaced the black school. The black school it replaced was torn down and paved over (it became the parking lot for the local newspaper that evolved into USA Today). They called it Southern Progressivism, a wholly new approach to these problems. But the white high school was old and ugly and largely ignorant of the fact that Cocoa High was built because that’s where the segregated black school had been (locale, not physically). This approach reverberated around the state, tearing down and building anew in the face of court demands.
My first year at Cocoa High, we had at least one race riot. Police with rifles spent a week on campus. You could walk out into the parking lot to see student trucks with their own rifles there. A few years earlier, one of the black guys I would play football with had a cross burned in his yard. Because of my parents involvement with Bridge Builders, he (at least) spent a week in our home. Because his parents were afraid. Fear lingers. And we have to do something about that.
But I’ve steered away from my point here. Three blocks from the Metropolitan Baptist Church, basically at the entrance to the black neighborhood off of King Street was the hanging tree. Now I’m not exactly sure of when I became aware of the hanging tree, but I know who told me. Tonya Riley, the daughter of the pastor of the black Baptist Church and co-founder of Bridge Builders, with whom I was going to junior high. None of the white folks I grew up with knew about the hanging tree. This would hardly be surprising since all of us came to Florida because of the space race. Brevard County went from 50,000 people in the 1950s to half a million by 1970. And African-Americans wouldn't talk about it, probably for lots of reasons. I came across it by accident. When I was learning to play slide guitar, I sought out the old bluesman in our area and so I would walk by it every week. Someone in that neighborhood warned me that the way I walked was spooky and advised me to take another route. “Why?” I asked. “Because you walk by the hanging tree and you don’t want to do that.”
But the Black adults would not tell me anything about it. Only the pre-teen daughter preacher’s kid would explain it to me. And my question in return was, why was this old, dying tree (it looked like it had been hit by lightening and was definitely not care for) still there. “The Cocoa City council won’t allow it,” I was told. Fear lingers. And that fear was left lingering. Intentionally. Even after they forgot about it, the people in power would just leave it there.
So I should not have been surprised that lynchings 100 years ago — 100 hundred years — still influences voter registration rates today. But I was shocked. After all, I had been part of the Obama campaign and I can remember the tears of African-Americans young and old in meeting him or just helping to elect him as president. Someone had contacted me in the late stages of the 2008 campaign asking if I could send some campaign lit to Mississippi. We didn’t have lit for the states that weren’t in doubt, but I’d return from swing states with lit in my trunk, usually from the primaries, and still had them around. So I sent Pennsylvania lit to Mississippi and then got a request (“you sent some to Mississippi!?!”) from Alabama, which got my old Ohio lit. Eventually, I had none left over! So I thought we had turned the corner. You may have as well. I suspect we all had, until Trump.
Over the years, but especially since 2007, I have talked to southern African-Americans about the hanging tree. Especially among older people, but even among younger ones, they had heard about their local hanging tree. Older people would talk about it in hushed tones, as if it’s something you didn’t talk about. I can remember someone telling me that white folks didn’t know about it, “but we do.” More than once, I had to explain why I knew about it (maybe I was Klan or something) and I would have to explain that Tonya and I had decided in our tweens that if the adults wouldn’t do anything about it, we would. We dipped nails in the poisons or weed killers our dad’s had around and started putting signs up on that tree. The first sign I put up was a peace sign made of cardboard (probably an old box) and colorfully painted. I used 12 nails. Dunno why, but I remember the number. Tonya put up signs for the church. Others joined us, but Tonya and I tried to “hang” a new sign each week. Nails dipped in the special sauce. For some reason, we found the exercise poignant.
I don’t think the older black folks I’ve told this really believed we killed the hanging tree (and the city had to remove it because the possibility that it would fall down threatened traffic). How could I be morally offended by the hanging tree? I couldn’t believe everyone wasn’t. The tree’s death was a miracle and I can live with that. But even though the laws had changed and new schools were being built, racism perpetuates and fear lingers.
Reading and discussing the Williams paper this summer really put into perspective the doubts all of us had faced in either electing Barack president or Warnock to the Senate. “You’ll never elect a black man to …” Every one of us had heard that before. But here I was preaching the gospel of Democrats: we can’t win elections without African-Americans, especially African-American women. And, for us, the 12 of us, at least, eliminating this form of voter suppression is as much a moral imperative as eliminating it at the polls.
This season, the NFL is allowing players to put 6 different messages on their helmets. One of those is “Stop Hate.” Which is great. But we can’t simply agree. We have to do more; even if we can stop hate, we will still need to address the fear that lingers. Fear that can last 100 years. Stopping hate is just not enough. We have to stop the fear, as well.
And we have a plan. You’ll have to read my next diary to see what that is, but we have a plan. A plan inspired by a paper, a special election and a group of young people who just won’t take it anymore. And it just might alter the outcome of the 2022 midterms. So there’s that.
Here’s the thing: a year ago, these eleven Albany State Students would have complained and asked, why isn’t there someone doing something about that? But that was before Warnock won, and they had tripled (or more) turnout in their counties in a special election, something that no one believed could be done. They turned conventional wisdom on it’s head and they made Republicans pay for the assumptions they made about African-American turnout. Now they mean to make them pay again. Fear may linger, but visceral activists, well, let’s just say that there is a counter to that fear. The last thing that Republicans want in 2022 is a highly motivated, pissed off African-American base. The. very. last. thing. I say we join them in this righteous cause...