Ecclesiastes 3 tells us that there is a time for all things: a time to mourn and a time to laugh, a time to weep and a time to dance, a time to keep silent and a time to speak. One of the more famous books and movies about Southern racism “A Time to Kill,” takes its name from a line in that chapter. The line in Ecclesiastes 3 right after “a time to kill” though is more appropriate to our current moment. It reads “a time to heal.”
There is a time for a policy paper (and there have been and will be more policy-oriented essays in this series), but today is not that time. There is a time for talking in the language of “both sides” (and there have been and will be more of those in this series) but today is not that time.
Martin Luther King Jr. asked us all to look injustice in the face and think about it, hard. I do not intend this essay series to be a blog and I do not intend to be too personal too often in this series, but I have some connection to the injustice King asked us all to reflect on and, however painful it is to make public, I have to say it because healing cannot come without apology and apology cannot come without truth.
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In August 2020, I traveled back to my parents’ home in Alabama. While there, I went to Montgomery and visited the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church where King preached as well as visited the new National Memorial for Peace and Justice, the country’s first memorial dedicated to Black victims of slavery and lynching. The memorial is an emotionally powerful, visually stunning history lesson. It is a small but welcome step in Americans owning up to the legacy of our forebears. The monument was well-designed. For every county in America in which there was a documented lynching, there is a suspended steel column that echoes lynching’s grisly, grotesque inhumanity. There are over 800 columns.
There is a jar of dirt from every lynching site in Alabama. They needed a whole wall for the jars.
The monument conveys the magnitude of the crimes (at least 4,400 people killed and millions intimidated) without losing sight that each victim was a person with a story. It’s haunting and gut-wrenching. As it should be.
The point of a monument is twofold: 1) it is society choosing what historical events to highlight and 2) it is society sending a message to itself about what it wants to be today. Monuments to Confederates have been a contentious issue lately. Most of them were erected in the early 20th century as an effort to remind African-Americans of who still held the whip hand in society, literally and metaphorically. There have been many, including myself, who have advocated for the removal of those monuments. The last people who should be honored in a country dedicated to all being free and equal are those did everything they could to maintain racial hierarchy and deny Black people the liberty that is their natural right.
When we’ve argued for removing these statues, we’ve been accused of wanting to erase history. We’re not trying to erase history. We’re trying to erase pride in the Confederacy. If a person wants to take pride in Southern cuisine or football or something else not tied to racism, they should feel free to do that. But the Confederacy and the racial apartheid that came in its wake were built, top-to-bottom, on white supremacy and enforcing racial hierarchy with lynching-centered terrorism.
The point of removing those statues isn’t to tell people to not to think about history. The point is to tell them that whatever else their great-great-great grandfather who fought for the South might have done, the very act of fighting for the South was so reprehensible that no one should have any positive feelings about him. He was, like the larger Confederacy, morally irredeemable. There are no clearer bad guys in American history than those who committed treason for the purposes of committing atrocities, the traitors who fought to defend slavery and oppression.
Understanding history is not a problem; lionizing Confederates and the Jim Crow South is. We can have history, but that history needs to be in monuments like this one that help us own up to, and perhaps one day atone for, that past.
Monuments are also about the present. The present-day point of this monument, and hopefully more like it, particularly when combined with taking down Confederate statues, is to send a message to two groups. Hopefully, it conveys to racially resentful white people that their grip on society is little-by-little weakening. The historical narratives they’d like to convey won’t go unquestioned; the historical narratives they’d like to conveniently forget will be highlighted.
Hopefully, it also sends a message to Black Americans that the injustices perpetrated against their predecessors are finally being acknowledged. Black Americans deserve to have their history heard too. The real erasure of history is not the tearing down of Confederate monuments but rather the broader refusal to come to terms with the ways in which liberty was denied to African-Americans on the most massive of scales.
The brutal history of slavery, of the convict labor and sharecropping systems that were slavery by another name, of Jim Crow, and of mass incarceration —those are the histories that people have tried to erase. This monument epitomizes the refusal to erase that history. If American history truly is something you cherish, you ought to have some profound feelings about this monument and what it represents.
We as a nation did wrong by our Black fellow-citizens. We can do better. We must do better. That starts by saying “We understand what we did and we’re sorry. No buts. We did wrong and we’re sorry.”
Reconciliation starts with forgiveness. Forgiveness can’t happen until there’s a genuine apology. That apology can’t happen until there’s a genuine appreciation of the real history, not the airbrushed one constructed to avoid making white people squeamish. This monument is a first step on that path. Hopefully, two centuries of slavery, another century of terror and apartheid, and fifty years of indifference and inequality may finally yield to an era defined by the concepts embodied in this monument’s name: peace and justice.
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The National Memorial for Peace and Justice hit me especially hard because, and I’ve told extremely few people this, my family participated in that oppression.
My great-grandfather (Theophilus Hill) was the sheriff of a sundown town (Wilsonville, Alabama) in the 1920s. His brother Stinson was the local Klan leader. I don’t have direct evidence of any specific crime but it would be preposterous to not assume that they were involved in some horrible acts, and there were some very dark rumors that got passed down in the family. What happened to Black folks in and around the ‘fourmile’ area between Columbiana and Wilsonville Alabama as well as countless sundown towns in the 1920s was terrorism. Those two men were terrorists by any reasonable definition of the word. If you walk around Wilsonville Alabama today, or drive around the ‘fourmile’ area, you’re unlikely to see any Black folks. That’s because my forebears terrorized them into leaving.
I didn’t do any of that, but I’m still sorry it happened and I’m ashamed to be connected to it even tangentially. White Americans want to claim connection to their ancestors who raised the flag in Iwojima, but they always act like the people cheering on a lynching were related to anyone but them. That’s motivated ignorance. It’s a certain kind of shirking. I cannot, I will not, indulge in such maneuvers.
I have no idea what I’m supposed to do to make up for my ancestors’ sins but admitting connection to them seems a useful first step. If you’re white, from the South, and have family connections in the South that go back more than a few generations, you too almost certainly have connections with some monsters, not just Klan people but also those who fought for the Confederacy. They too were monsters.
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Wilsonville, along with Columbiana and Chelsea (the two towns I grew up in), are all in Shelby County. Yes- that Shelby County from Shelby Co. v. Holder- the place that led the charge to gut the Voting Rights Act.
The earliest and most lasting memories that I have that are related to injustice all revolve around race. When I was 7 or 8 (so this would have been the mid-1990s), I remember seeing a burning cross only a few miles from where we lived while we were driving home one night. It was terrifying. Even as a child, I understood the malevolence and violence it was meant to convey. A burning cross is not a thing you forget. I’m 35 and this was in *my* living memory. The first time I went to a little league baseball game, the teams were integrated but the white parents sat on the first base side and the black parents sat on the third base side. That may seem like a relic of a backward place but that kind of informal but very real segregation plagues a number of areas of American society to this day.
Before she died, my grandmother told me a number of stories about what things used to be like there. She was a de facto single mom who worked at the grocery store. The grocery store was where voting took place. Soon after she started working there in the late 40s, a young black man came in in his old Army uniform and wanted to register to vote. She registered him. In her telling, she did this more out naivete than out of courage. She had the forms and he asked to fill one out so she let him fill one out. She was quickly informed by the manager that if she ever made that mistake again, she would find herself without a job. She told me also of how literacy tests were administered and no matter how well the black voter read, they were always deemed illiterate and thus ineligible to vote. She never liked any of this but what was she supposed to do? If she lost her job, how was she to provide for my father and uncle? So she went along with all of it. What was she supposed to do?
There was one story in particular though that she told that I’ll never forget because she said it with such shame in her eyes. It was the one so awful that you could tell that she wished she’d done something, come what may in terms of consequences.
In their town, well into the 1960s, the dentist refused to see black patients. He said that if he used his instruments on black customers, white customers would refuse to patronize his business. So, if a black person really needed a tooth pulled or needed some other unavoidable dental work, they had to go to the veterinarian. Read that again. They. Had. To. Go. To. The. Veterinarian. The white people in town thought that shit was hilarious. Even now, that story makes me shake with rage and makes me want to vomit. The thirst for humiliation and dominance in that is as breathtaking as it is nauseating. This was white Americans metaphorically kneeling on Black Americans’ necks just to show that they could.
I recount these stories first to give evidence that American racism is not some thing of ancient history and second to admit that that is the context from which I came. My forebears, both direct and more general, committed heinous crimes. I didn’t personally do it, but I’m still sorry. So, so very sorry. Maybe that counts for nothing, but I hope it’s something. It’s a tiny drop in the ocean of what is owed but I do want Black America to hear a white man with a clear connection to the sins of America’s past say it: I’m sorry, to the bottom of my heart, I’m sorry.
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Just as I cannot undo my great-grandfather’s crimes, we, the collective U.S. society of 2022 cannot undo the past, but we can stop denying liberty to black Americans. Just as a start, we can end qualified immunity, we can end overcriminalization, we can demilitarize the police, we can end coercive plea bargaining, we can abolish civil asset forefeitures, and we can abolish pretextual stops. But we’re not doing any of those things, at least not yet. I don’t know why we’re not but my guess is that it is because too many white Americans would rather act as if the sins of the past were committed by someone else’s family and not their own (though that obviously cannot be true for everyone). They’d like to think that the liberty denial of the past is entirely cordoned off to the past and has no connection to today (though that obviously isn’t true if you just look around at American society with open eyes for so much as three or four seconds).
I do not pretend to be Martin Luther King Jr. I do not pretend to fully understand the Black experience. But it is Martin Luther King Jr. Day and I do think he’d want white people like myself to own up to our connection to the sins of the past and to say we’re sorry, not sorry in an “I did this” way, but I’m sorry in an “I recognize the crimes that my ancestors did to your ancestors and though I wasn’t personally responsible, I ‘d like to try to make it right” way. Liberty has been denied Black folks for far, far too long. It is a stain upon America and a deliberate infringment on Black people’s inalienable rights. It has to end and it has to end now because……………………
Black Lives Matter. Black Dreams Matter. Black Children Matter. Black Ambitions Matter. Black Families Matter. Black Rights Matter. Black Americans Matter.
Black Liberty Matters.