"THE OPPOSITE OF POVERTY IS NOT WEALTH...."

“THE OPPOSITE OF POVERTY IS NOT WEALTH…”

            Caroline and I are on a trip to visit our long-time friends, David Billings and Margery Freeman, in McComb, Mississippi, traveling through Alabama.  Though these were not states when the Constitution was adopted, this is the land of the original “originalists.”  One of the central dynamics of the Constitution was to preserve privileged, white male power.  There is no mention of the rights of women.  African-Americans and Native Americans are deemed to be only 60 % human.

            I thought about this a lot as we visited the National Memorial for Peace and Justice and the Legacy Museum in Montgomery.  They are the work of the Equal Justice Initiative and are powerful testimony to the past and current injustice and inequities in American history.   The National Memorial is an artistic rendering of the terror and power of lynching in American history.  Sculptures hang down, representing people lynched.  The initial sculptures are by counties, and there is seemingly no pattern to them.  I kept wanting to put them by states, but it was chaotic and unpatterned.  It took me awhile to allow the art to penetrate my senses.  The purpose of these initial pieces of art is to give us a feeling of chaos, of terror, of inability to know when or where the next lynching is coming.  It is a reminder that for those classified as “black” in US history, lynching is always on the table, no matter the locale, no matter the time, no matter the economic status.  

            I was looking for one particular sculpture, that of Phillips County, Arkansas – my home county.  There, in and around Elaine, Arkansas, over 230 African-American people were lynched in two days’ time, in 1919, the largest number of African-Americans killed in lynchings in US history.  On the second turn, I found it, and it was depressing and sobering and angering and defeating.  Some of my forebears were in on that.  They may not have participated in it.  In fact, I am assuming that they did not, but I do not know.  I never knew the magnitude of the executions, and I never thought to ask my mother or other relatives – it was taboo.  Yet, whether they pulled the triggers or not, they supported it.  Difficult stuff.

            After the initial round of sculptures, we finally came to the state groupings, and there were many more in Arkansas counties than I had previously thought.  For some reason (actually I know the reason), I thought the lynchings were confined to the Deep South east of the Mississippi River and to the River Delta on the Arkansas side where I grew up.  After that, the staff invited us to climb the small incline to view all the monuments.  The purpose of the viewing was to allow the spirits of those people who were lynched to cry out to the perpetrators, and it was a powerful time to listen to the voices.

            Next we went to the Legacy Museum, which proclaimed to us that lynching was still with us, that it had now evolved to DWB, police brutality, mass incarceration, skewed income tax tables and deductions, red-lining, destabilizing of the public school system, and many other forms of the racism that has informed our national heritage since its beginnings.   I was struck by many things in this exhibit – one was the jars of dirt collected from some of the known sights of lynchings.  Another was an announcement in the Hattiesburg paper in June, 1915, that John Hartfield would be lynched the next day – no spontaneous anger here, but rather an announcement of a murder to come.  Many brought picnics to watch, and many sold picture postcards afterward – almost 10,000 people gathered to watch a man murdered.  So, for those who feel that our national love of violence is a new thing, please hear that it is in our marrow and DNA.

            Bryan Stevenson, the person behind these profound exhibits put it this way:  “The opposite of poverty is not wealth.  The opposite of poverty is justice.”  Wherever we are, whatever we are, let us recall these words.  Let us recall the idea of equity and equality that is part of our national heritage, an idea that so often loses out to racism and sexism and materialism.   We have three weeks left to make some small movement back towards equity and equality -  please, please vote, and make sure that your friends, colleagues and neighbors vote.   

 Because this is what looms over us:  for those who think that this is only ancient history, please note that Gorsuch and Kavanaugh join Alioto and Thomas as “originalists” on the Supreme Court, with Roberts now being the swing vote.  That is a scary thought!

            The voices of the people who have been lynched - and who will be lynched – now cry out to us.  Let us hear and act in behalf of their humanity and of our own.  It won’t end with the election, of course, but it will be a start back towards justice.