"SOUTHERN HORRORS"

“SOUTHERN HORRORS”

            Three years ago in February, 2015, my long-time friends David Billings and Margery Freeman e-mailed me a New York Times article of a list of the history of lynchings  in the South from 1877 to 1950.  It was researched and compiled and published by the Equal Justice Institute in Montgomery, Alabama, under the directorship of Bryan Stevenson.  It indicated that there were 3,959 documented victims of racial terror lynchings in those years.  David was sending this to me for several reasons, not the least of which is that the study indicated that our home county (Phillips County, Arkansas) had four times as many lynchings as the next highest county.  This garish statistic was largely due to the fact that at least 237 African-Americans had been killed in the Elaine Race Riot near our hometown of Helena, Arkansas in 1919.

            This past week in Montgomery, the Equal Justice Institute had its grand opening of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice and Legacy Museum, including a memorial to these victims of the white supremacy lynchings.  Other good friends, Ed Loring and Murphy Davis, had invited us to attend the opening with them, but to our regret, we were not able to do so.  We will attend soon, and though it will be grim, it will be a very necessary journey for all of us in the USA, especially those of us classified as “white.”  It is essential that we all engage and acknowledge this history, because until we do, we will never understand the continuing depths of all our captivity to the power of race.

            My journey with the Elaine Race Riot is typical of so many of our journeys with this sordid history.  Growing up, I was taught white supremacy by my family and my church and my culture.  As I got into high school, I began to question a bit of it, thanks to some adults who engaged me on it, and thanks to David Billings’ willingness to consider a different narrative with me.  Don’t get me wrong – we were not heroes or advocates on this in high school – it would be several years before a summer in New York City would change our narratives and our perceptions forever.  In high school, however, we began to wonder if we were getting the whole story in our white supremacist narrative.  The Elaine Race Riot was rarely ever mentioned in those days, forgotten and of course not acknowledged as one of the biggest slaughters in American history.   When we did get wind of it, it was always in the context of uppity black people (“n-word” then) having to be put in their place.  For some reason, I assumed that it meant only a few people killed, and I look back now in horror that the small number made it seem OK to me.

            I only really discovered the depths of death and depravity of this lynching in my early study of Ida Wells in the early 1990’s.  I learned that she had come down from Chicago in 1922 (in her first trip back South since 1893) to visit the 12 black men who had been sentenced to death for their attempts to defend themselves and their families in the Elaine Race Riot.  She had written an article for the Chicago Defender about this development, and through her hard work and that of the NAACP, the Supreme Court eventually overturned their convictions.  In the midst of this study, I discovered that the father of one of my high school acquaintances had written an article for the Arkansas Historical Quarterly in 1960, seeking to refute Ida Wells’ charges of lynchings and injustice.  He sought, in the midst of the civil rights upheavals, to justify white supremacy and take us back to the time when that supremacy was accepted by all.   Though I had learned a lot, I was shocked to see that this man, as far as I knew a respected doctor, had sought to justify white supremacy in this way at such a late date.

            It is this strain of thought and discovery that makes the National Memorial for Peace and Justice such a necessary journey for all of us.  This is our history, and we must all acknowledge it and walk through it.  We’ll be going there soon, and I hope that you will be too. Ida Wells published one of the first lists of the lynchings , and she debunked the myth that the lynchings were in response to black male rape of white women.  It was entitled “Southern Horrors:  Lynch Law in All Its Phases.” Frederick Douglass wrote the intro to that study,  because even a giant like Douglass had begun to wonder if there were not a kernel of truth in the white supremacist claim about the lasciviousness of black men.  Wells, and now Bryan Stevenson, have helped us to see the stark and difficult truth of lynching about ourselves and about American history:  white terrorism, plain and brutal.