Learning the History of Lynching Helped Heal My Wounds
It took me a long time before I realized my family’s struggles had not simply materialized out of thin air — that though we have rightly never made excuses about our faults, they weren’t evidence of ugliness running through our veins. My father beat my mother. My maternal grandfather beat my maternal grandmother. Moochie, my hero big brother, murdered a man. My youngest brother Jordan is serving 20 years in a federal prison. A nephew, raised like a brother, is in the middle of a 25-year sentence in a state facility. Another brother is serving 16 years.
But I know now that a sense of shame convinced us to not speak too loudly about our struggles, only to fuel a cycle of violence that led to more shame. I’ve learned you can’t cure a disease you refuse to acknowledge, and it was not until recently that I myself did so fully.
As I prepared myself to visit the National Memorial for Peace and Justice and The Legacy Museum in Alabama, now open to the public, I had a reaction I had not anticipated: a rage I hadn’t realized I still harbored, at the unbroken chain that connects slavery and lynchings to today’s unpunished police violence and my very own life.
I have long watched people perpetrate violence against black bodies, but in recent years many have joined me, as videos — often of police actions — have become so readily available. We do this as we pat ourselves on the back because of the gains we have made; indeed, in the wake of the era of America’s first black president. But while we may now witness these atrocities with safety and privacy, we nonetheless share much with those who watched Mary Turner in 1918 Georgia be hung from a tree by her ankles, doused with gasoline, set afire, her 8-month-old fetus cut from her belly and stomped upon.
Before I had heard Turner’s story in Patrick Phillips’ Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America, I didn’t know they had lynched us and taught us to hate ourselves for not being able to perfectly navigate a terrorized land soaked in slave blood. Turner was lynched because she demanded justice for her husband, who himself had just been lynched. Countless others died like this because they dared to try to vote, organize black laborers or were deemed “uppity” in their attempts to exercise their rights. Many black men hung from trees after being falsely accused of raping white women, or for merely speaking to or glancing at them in a way that white men deemed inappropriate. A twisted hallucination, born of hate, became a justification for murder. The rules between right and wrong were always morphing, intentionally illusive. To survive, we told ourselves that talking right or walking right or beating our kids enough to keep them in line would convince white people that we, too, are American, worthy, beautiful. But we were mistaken. So the shame grew, and we swallowed it. ...