lynching : mackenzian

CN: frank reflections on anti-Black lynching.

Today, the Equal Justice Institute announced a new historical marker in Letohatchee, Alabama, a tiny town 24 miles south-west of the state capital, Montgomery.

Non-Alabamians know Montgomery as the capital of the Confederate States of America during the 1860s and the site of the anti-segregation bus boycott during the 1960s. Today, Letohatchee is a zebra town: more than 7 of 10 residents is Black and almost all of the rest are White.

They have a bloody common history.

A royal blue historical marker, likely made out of metal, reads "Lynching in Letohatchee" in capital letters. "Equal Justice Institute" is in white capital letterss at the bottom of the marker. In the background are grass and tree branches. People's legs are visible toward the edges of the photo. — The Equal Justice Institute opened a new historical marker in Letohatchee, AL, July 31, 2016. Photo via the Equal Justice Institute.

As the EJI explains, this marker is the first to tell the stories of seven Black people lynched by mobs of White Letohatchee residents between 1900 and 1917. Police never arrested anyone for these murders. Prosecutors never reviewed these cases. Justice never emerged, and it still hasn’t.

But as of yesterday, a royal blue metal town marker describes the deaths of seven people killed in Letohatchee: two men, one a father; two brothers; a woman, wife, and mother; a son; a daughter. It memorializes the documented murders of seven more.

Title: Lynching in Letohatchee
Credit: Equal justice Institute
Year: 2016

It can take 116 years for the truth to become a public fact, a fact like “a clay mining company operates in Letohatchee,” and “Jefferson Davis was once sworn in as Confederate president just a few miles away,” and “this town is only 18 miles long.”

One hundred and sixteen years ago, White Letohatchee residents brutally killed Black Letohatchee residents, “and no one was ever arrested.”

No one will ever be arrested, because the murder victims are dead. The people who murdered them are dead. The state officials who failed to intervene or protect or pursue justice are dead.

Native American activists have argued that there can be no justice without common memory. We have to get specific about what that means. Because in this case, as we remember fourteen people whom White people lynched in Letohatchee and thousands of others murdered elsewhere around the country, some people have simply vanished.

The people who’ve killed other people in the service of racist terrorism and White supremacy have disappeared into our euphemisms to the degree that the subjects and the objects of lynchings almost appear to be the same.

Jim Cook was lynched. The Powell brothers were lynched. But by whom? Who lynched them? We lose the names of these actors in passive verbal phrases and impersonal nouns. Faceless, nameless mobs become footnotes a century and two decades after they’ve vented their fear, hatred, and contempt. The evil they expressed in violent gangs and crowds dissipates with them.

A century and two decades is long enough for pews of White supremacists to marry, have children, start grocery stores, keep farming, buy some land, sell some land, babysit grandchildren who move away for college, and die in peace in the woods. So they did in Letohatchee, Alabama. So they have everywhere in this country.

When entire mobs are absent from common memory, the record becomes a lean-to in time and space, a house with a wobbly termite-ridden floor that could buckle under anybody, and does. When euphemism hinders us from perceiving the degree and scope of violence, the truth we need to build our world on can be buried under hagiographies and face-saving histories. And when we simplify the truth for hymnodic myths, we can all band together and doubt whether those who remember accurately want the peace and unity we long for.

That’s not “common memory.” It’s common fantasy.

We need more testimonies of the lives of victims of lynching in the United States, just like those the Letohatchee community came together yesterday to share. We also need full accountings of the people who killed those victims. Because the full story is the ground we all stand on. It’s the toxic water we’re drinking together. It’s the air we’re breathing, and it chokes us, as it should.

It can take 116 years for the truth to be told, and only when the truth has advocates like the Equal Justice Institute. The truth needs many more advocates. It needs us all.

“EJI believes that truthfully acknowledging this history is vital to healing and reconciliation.” So do I.

So do I.

Content note: descriptions of anti-Black lynching and White terrorism. This post is related to yesterday’s comments on torture.

I’m at that point in The Cross and the Lynching Tree where James Cone asks how Reinhold Niebuhr, one of 20th Century America’s leading Christian theologians, managed to live through the heyday of anti-Black lynching but never mentioned it as an ethical concern.

How could he have taught the church during the era of W. E. B. Du Bois and A. Philip Randolph, yet failed to cite any Black philosophers, activists, or writers? How could he have read the newspapers during the years that White mobs kidnapped and killed Mack Parker and Emmett Till, but failed to engage the conditions or communities that produced their murders? How could he have insisted that Black people be “patient” with White crawls toward a just society yet promoted a gospel that inspired economic justice throughout the South?

Cone explains this Laodicean dissonance as a failure of empathy.

It was easy for Niebuhr to walk around in his own shoes, as a white man, and view the world from that vantage point, but it takes a whole lot of empathic effort to step into those of black people and see the world through the eyes of African Americans…

Niebuhr knew that denying membership to persons merely on the basis of race was also a denial of the Church’s Christian identity. Yet he also knew that white churches were not prepared to include blacks, a minority they truly despised, and he was not prepared to deny the Christian identity of white churches on that basis.” —James Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree

So Niebuhr understood that Christianity called followers of Jesus to social equity, and he acknowledged that churches were failing to embody that standard. But he wasn’t willing to challenge the churches for failing their own faith’s standards, and he also literally encouraged a congregation to abandon its attempt to integrate.

The camera looks up at a tower of the National Cathedral, Washington, D.C. The tower is scaffolded for repairs. In the background a deep blue sky is filled with white, fluffy clouds. The tower is in shadow. Photo by Keisha E. McKenzie. — The National Cathedral, like the nation’s faith, needs work. Photo credit: Keisha E. McKenzie

This morning I read a fantastic extended article on the only person known to have survived a race-based lynching in the United States, James Herbert Cameron.

Cameron, born in 1914 and therefore just a year older than my still-living grandfather, was one of three teenagers arrested by local Indiana police and then set upon by a mob of White vigilantes. Cameron’s friends were beaten, tortured, and hung in the middle of town, but someone interrupted his hanging—his memoir and others’ accounts conflict on who—and he was able to escape from town.

Cameron died in 2006, after years he’d filled with family, manufacturing jobs and store management, writing and book sales, and founding, funding, and curating America’s Black Holocaust Museum in Milwaukee. At that museum, he walked visitors through exhibits on slavery, segregation, lynching, and his own experience.

Read his story.

Even with stories like Cameron’s, “White theologians, then and since,” Cone writes, “have typically ignored the problem of race or written and spoken about it without urgency, not regarding it as critical for theology or ethics.”

This moderate neutrality is uncomfortable to recognize. It should be uncomfortable to recognize. And it’s part of the “profound moral failure” that people of faith today must be willing to resolve.

I see no way to be moderate or neutral when it comes to human flourishing. I believe moral leadership requires more from us, even and especially those of us in faith subcultures that “aren’t prepared” to move forward.

The bad news:

The will-to-survive is so strong that it transmutes easily in to the will-to-power… Groups use both religion and reason to advance their own interests and find it nearly impossible to ‘feel the pain of others as vividly as they do [their own].'”

The good news: “Nearly impossible” is not impossible! I still believe that empathy, reason, and faith can support us in subverting dangerous and violent expressions of our drive to survive.

And I take encouragement from James Herbert Cameron’s lifelong resilience despite a community that nearly beat him to death while both the police and the church looked on.

CN: Missing from common memory

(CN) Moderate and neutral