Local Lynching Stories and their relevance to activism today

 These two recent videos tell the stories of a lynching in 1885 and in the 1930s.   The details of specific stories like these are excellent entry points for people to understand the reality of lynching and then to understand how lynching was a tool to reassert white supremacy after the First Reconstruction (1867-77). Thanks to Amy and her friend for sharing the video links with me.

BURN: The Lynching of George Armwood

https://youtu.be/kERIFEu_cyE

Outrage in Rockland

https://youtu.be/mRmxRC4Te8o

 

Lynchings were not about punishing a black person because he or she committed a specific "crime."  The purpose was to terrorize a population, it was about power, about systems and not about individuals. Most white people today think racism is not systemic -- that is the hurtle that needs to be jumped today.

These are excellent videos to show how widespread and deep lynchings have been. They become "family affairs" as a way to forge a white community bonded by the belief that black people are not human - their lives don't matter.   Fear is fundamental and expressed through hatred, anger, arrogance and condescension.  Until whites confront their fears, guilt and ignorance, they will continue to act to suppress black humanity.

The Armwood video:  would allow people to explore how Maryland was an upper South state -- compare it with the state and federal governments' responses to lynching in the deep southern states.  A good discussion of the politics of the different state reactions would lead to an understanding of how the Southern Freedom Movement (SFM) evolved its tactics from 1955-65, and why SFM (aka civil rights movement) morphed into black power/black studies.  

It is essential to the Armwood lynching in its historical context of lynching.  One can do this by starting with James Allen's "movie" of postcards of lynchings.  "They Say" is a very good book to accompany Allen's movie.  Then move to a bigger lens: The First Reconstruction and formation of KKK; The end of Reconstruction and the creation of Jim Crow with lynching as enforcement; then the formation of the NAACP (out of earlier organizations and campaigns) and it's anti-lynching campaign (including the failure of the Dyer Bill, and the NAACP's failed campaign against Birth of a Nation)

To bring this incident up to date:  the mob left Armwood's dead and burned body in the street for a long time -- like the police did to Michael Brown's body in Ferguson The police forced Armwood to confess.  The "Exonerated Five" have recently written an op-ed piece in which they call for support for a NY State bill to tape all the interviews, not just the one leading to a confession.  The video ends with a plea: unless this story is talked about, recognized by whites today, this local history remains a "stab in the heart" to the local black community.  I would add, that because there was a clear pattern to these lynchings, it was systematic, we need a federal reparations commission to make sure white Americans are confronted by lynchings and other crimes against humanity.

Outrage in Rockland, actually provides some of that historical context missing in the Armwood video as well as really offering an access point to discussing the importance of infrastructure. No current story illustrates the importance of infrastructure to the success of political goals than the one involving Stacey Abrahms and many more  (it takes a village).  Over the last 15 years, they created the infrastructure leading to yesterday's Democratic win in the Georgia US Senate races (yes, building infrastructure is hard and tedious and takes a long time (which is why it is mostly women who do it?). Without the proliferation of local civil rights organizations that developed before 1910, there would never have been an NAACP.  What happened in Rockland was repeated throughout the South.  The Churches and local civil rights organizations provided the infrastructure for the "Second Reconstruction" of 1955-65.  

I love and hate the intimacy that these two videos.  Both the heroics of individuals and the depravity of the mob are riveting.  It is really the only way to generally connect people to the larger context, which is more abstract and harder to grasp.  This is where most education fails, the inability to make connections betwee the personal and the political.  And leads people to have no faith in their ability to change things. That Johnson was able to raise money and have a track record of legal successes meant he was a serious threat to white supremacy.  Whites believed that the black community needed to be put on notice  --  blacks might win in the courts, but would not win in the world. This is about power ("justice" v "law").  This is why both legal and nonviolent direct action are required for social movements to succeed.

The Brother of Liberty's legal wins described in the video: RR car, MD bar admission and others I am sure) certainly provoked backlash that including lynchings? The main goal of Ida Well's research was to expose as a myth that black men were lynched because they had raped (or otherwise threatened white womanhood) as justification for lynching.  She had hard data to prove it was not the case. The truth was that white men were raping black women systematically.  The deeply rooted and prevalence of the myth suggests that white men projected their barbarity onto black men.  The apparent arbitrary nature of the targets chosen by mobs conveniently terrorized the entire black community.  This terrorism was part of an entire toolkit used to eliminate the civil rights gains of the First Reconstruction and reassert white supremacy.  Again, the strategy to appeal to federal courts (get it out of state courts) presages the strategy of the Civil rights movement, of the NAACP.  But, again, you can win at the Supreme Court (Brown v Board) but not win in reality (southern states shut down public schools and created private white only ones).  This then required the use of nonviolent direct action in concert with legal action.