Raising Cain...

Healing the collective trauma of American lynching

Many things trouble me about the dark era of lynching, but several features in particular blow my mind: Lynching was still going on in the United States until I was 8 years old, if not longer. Some of the lynchings drew huge crowds of white Americans, sometimes as many as 10 to 15 thousand at a time. Accounts of lynchings reveal an over-the-top savagery in attacks on bodies of people being lynched. Relatively few white people -- including clergy -- spoke publicly against lynching, and for many years, neither federal nor state governments did anything to stop it.

As I was writing my previous post in this series on truth and reconciliation, I already knew that the next post would focus on lynching. I just wasn’t sure how to narrow that focus for a blog post, since lynching is a huge and complex subject with multiple levels of meaning shaped by many variations of lived experience, past and present.

The answer came this week, which is, for Christians, a holy week remembering the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. In a series of meditations and connections through the Internet beginning Thursday, April 2^nd, I was inspired to zero in on lynching as a form of mob/state violence intended to evoke terror and thus control a feared “other”.

In 2002, while in Atlanta for a workshop, I had the opportunity to see James Allen's Without Sanctuary at the Martin Luther King Center. This exhibit -- which James Cone describes as "a kind of pornography"¹ -- features photographs of lynchings in the United States. Photographers who took these pictures printed them as postcards and sold them at public spectacle lynchings² to white people who came to watch.

Many years later, I’m still thinking that seeing Allen’s collection was, for me, an experience in the real, that place of immediate, raw experience -- of injury, astonishment, horror, or terror -- that can’t yet be put into words. Beyond all other questions arising from my exploration of America’s lynching history, this question of trauma has been one of the most compelling. As with other forms of outrageous violence, it’s likely that everyone involved -- unless they somehow were not a human being in the first place -- not only suffered psychological trauma but passed impacts of that trauma on to their descendents.³

 

Ida B. Wells-Barnett, was among those who spoke out publicly against lynching and inspired Black resistance to it. Photograph by Mary Garrity from c. 1893. (This version of the original has been edited.) [Wikipedia]

 

Before I saw Allen’s exhibit, I was vaguely aware of lynching but had never heard people really talk about it. Just as many people today think American society is “post-racial”, I must have assumed lynching and its impacts were all in the past…nothing to see here, move along. Though it’s taken me a long time to talk about it, I have no question that I lost my innocence and ignorance of lynching that day in Atlanta. I have come back to it many times since, though, exploring my experience, inviting new layers of meaning to emerge and be spoken, if only to myself.

Now I’m sensing a shift of energy with all of this. In the past few months, and especially during this holy week of Easter, I understand more than ever that a movement to open the record, to heal trauma and other consequences of lynching is underway. It is firmly anchored in the spiritual dimension of life, and flows from there. It won’t be about how far we can get our minds around it, but how far we can get our hearts around it.

I love the way James Cone brings all these connections together in his conclusion to The Cross and the Lynching Tree³:

The cross of Jesus and the lynching tree of black victims are not literally the same—historically or theologically. Yet these two symbols or images are closely linked to Jesus’ spiritual meaning for black and white life together in what historian Robert Handy has called “Christian America.” Blacks and whites are bound together in Christ by their brutal and beautiful encounter in this land. Neither blacks nor whites can be understood fully without reference to the other because of their common religious heritage as well as their joint relationship to the lynching experience. What happened to blacks also happened to whites. When whites lynched blacks, they were literally and symbolically lynching themselves—their sons, daughters, cousins, mothers and fathers and a host of other relatives. Whites may be bad brothers and sisters, murderers of their own black kin, but they are still our sisters and brothers. We are bound together in America by faith and tragedy. All the hatred we have expressed toward each other cannot destroy the profound mutual love and solidarity that flow deeply between us—a love that empowered blacks to open their arms to receive the many whites who were also empowered by the same love to risk their lives in the black struggle for freedom. No two people in America have had more violent and loving encounters than black and white people. We were made brothers and sisters by the blood of the lynching tree, the blood of sexual union, and the blood of the cross of Jesus. No gulf between blacks and whites is too great to overcome, for our beauty is more enduring than our brutality. What God joined together, no one can tear apart.

 

For further exploration:

Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror (Equal Justice Initiative, 2015)

Legacies of the Cross and the Lynching Tree (This article is an adaptation of the Conclusion to The Cross and the Lynching Tree by James H. Cone, Tikkun, 1/26/12)

The Cross and the Lynching Tree (James H. Cone, Kindle Edition, 2011)

Christian Soldiers (Jamelle Bouie, Slate, 2/10/15)

Easter Reflection: What Story Are We Telling? (Shannon Dycus, The Mennonite, 3/27/15)

Good Friday in America (Rev. Osagyefo Uhuru Sekou, Fellowship of Reconciliation, 4/3/15)

America's Willful Ignorance of Our History of Lynching Feeds Racial Hatred (Christen A. Smith, Melissa N. Stuckey, Alternet, 3/24/15)

Without Sanctuary: Photographs and Postcards of Lynching in America (James Allen, 2000)

________________________________________________________

¹ Cone, James H. (2011-09-01). The Cross and the Lynching Tree (p. 98). Orbis Books. Kindle Edition.

² The Equal Justice Initiative's recent report, Lynching in America, identifies public spectacle lynching as one of six features of terror lynchings. Most of such lynchings shared one or more of these features. See p.6 in either the pdf summary or the full hard copy report.

³ In the final chapter of Lynching in America, Equal Justice Initiative addresses issues of trauma and healing from the legacy of lynching in some depth. See pages 62-73 of the full report, available from EJI.

⁴ Cone, James H. (2011-09-01). The Cross and the Lynching Tree (pp. 165-166). Orbis Books. Kindle Edition.

Collective shadows and the culture of violence in the United States

This weekend in Selma, Alabama, people have gathered to remember the 50^th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday”. On March 7, 1965 -- in an extreme act of state violence -- Alabama state troopers brutally attacked civil rights marchers as they attempted to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in an expression of solidarity to secure equal voting rights.

It’s significant to me in light of this collective remembering that by far the strongest connection I made in my reading of An Indigenous People's History of the United States (Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz) and The Cross and the Lynching Tree (James H. Cone) was to violence. From the beginning, violence pervaded colonizers' relationships not only to the land, but with Native Americans, Black people uprooted and brought here as slaves, and, later, any others perceived as a threatening in some way. This behavior – in one form or another – has been carried on against other “enemies” by colonialist descendants.

According to military historian John Grenier, American settlers created a fighting tradition that featured destruction of noncombatants, villages, and agricultural resources. For successive generations of Americans soldiers and civilians, the killing of Indian men, women, and children became a defining element of their first military tradition and thus part of a shared American identity.^[i]

Though this first way of war lost its centrality after 1814, Grenier stresses that Americans must not forget that it has remained part of US military heritage.  In similar ways, the Civil War, strategic bombing of Nazi Germany and Japan in World War II, and the Vietnam War, represent other military campaigns in which the United States “blurred or even erased the boundaries between combatants and noncombatants”.^[ii]

There is another point made by Grenier that I find especially interesting in light of the pervasive shadow (and not-so-shadow) culture of violence that exists in the United States today.

It’s significant, says Grenier, that in the 1790s, settlers tired of what they saw as governmental and Army incompetence to secure the frontier, and so focused on destroying Indian villages and food supplies themselves:

They were unabashed in declaring that their intentions were to drive the Indians from lands on the western side of the Appalachian range and claim those lands as their own, whether the nation-state of the United States wanted them to do so or not.^[iii]

Reading this, I thought about how this vigilante mentality evolved later into lynching of Black people and, to some extent, other minorities. I believe the same shadow of violence found expression through Jim Crow laws, segregation, attacks on voting rights, and, more recently, mass incarceration. Violence (and genocide) against Native Americans continued through the system of reservations, boarding schools, corporate land grabs and broken treaties.

I think it’s likely that many other kinds of both subtle and overt bullying and violence trace back to the same foundations. I think it’s all present anytime institutions or individuals try to make objects out of subjects. In my own profession, for example, I came to understand that diagnosing so-called mental illness by imposing a label based on a DSM checklist is an act of violence. It has nothing to do with life as any person actually lives and experiences it. It is attempted soul murder.

This culture of violence will continue to fragment people, communities and social institutions until we – the collective of US citizenry -- acknowledge the violence that operated beneath the ideals of freedom and brotherhood that we continue to tell ourselves is what America is all about. As a nation, we need to bring our history of violence into the light. Until we can do this, we need to remember all of our bloody Sundays.

---

[i] John Grenier. The First Way of War: American War Making on the Frontier, 1607–1814 (Kindle Edition Locations 185-186, 203-205).

[ii] Grenier, Kindle Edition Locations 251-254).

[iii] Grenier, Kindle Edition Locations 240-245).

 

Related links:

Burying Vietnam, Launching Perpetual War (Christian Appy, 2/8/15)

Race and Revolution: Reckoning with racial injustice past and present (Goodman, 3/5/15)

March 7, 1965: ‘Bloody Sunday’ in Selma, Alabama (Richard Kreitner, 3/7/15)

It's a Non-Stop Land Grab From the American Indians (Bill Moyers, 12/26/14)

 

I'll be writing more about collective shadows and shadow work later; here's a great article in the meantime:

How We Contribute to the Collective Shadow (Diane Hancox, MA; 11/17/11)

 

In this presentation to the US Army War College, John Grenier reads from his book, The First Way of War:

 

 

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Lessons in the Language | The Media Co-op

Re-name Selma Edmund Pettus bridge, petition

Links on justice issues at Raising Cain @ wordpress

I am now posting links to articles on justice issues primarily at my Raising Cain @ wordpress blog. I hope to post more of my own writing on these subjects here at Raising Cain on Typepad. Lots going on. Much to write about. Much to heal in this country and on this planet.

Marco McMillian's Life And Death A Test For Civil Rights In The Mississippi Delta

Very interesting indepth article by Janell Ross (formerly a reporter at the Tennessean) on the death of Marco McMillian:

Before his mysterious death in late February, Marco McMillian had hoped to lead this community, running for mayor with a reform-minded agenda. McMillian, 33, was black, and the first openly gay person to vie for public office in Mississippi.

The nation’s first black president may have put gay rights squarely in the center of righteous and patriotic American struggles for equality during his second inaugural speech in January. And the Supreme Court is currently considering two of the most important gay rights cases in U.S. history. But the way McMillian’s life is understood, and his death investigated, is also a barometer of sorts on the state of American equality.

“There is some complicated, heartbreaking, truly tragic and important stuff going on in Clarksdale,” said Omowale Akintunde, a University of Nebraska professor and Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker. Akintunde came to town in early March to chronicle what he says is a story that America needs to see.

“What it tells us are some ugly truths about remaining bigotry and bias," he said, "even among those who have themselves been terrorized, exploited, excluded and demeaned.”

Read the full article at www.huffingtonpost.com

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Autopsy Findings Still Pending in Marco McMillian Murder

Was Marco McMillian Killed in Mississippi Because He Was Black or Gay?

Miss. town stunned by killing of gay mayor candidate

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Author Interview: David Cunningham, author of 'Klansville, U.S.A.' : NPR

Here's a clip from the interview transcript. Interesting for me to get more details on what was going on in North Carolina when I lived there for a few years in the late 50's to early sixties. You can also see an article and listen to the story at NPR.

Also see the recommended links below to current stories, one involving the KKK's hateful response to the Memphis (TN) City Council's vote to change the name of 3 city parks.

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Here's a headline you wouldn't want to see in your newspaper: Ku Klux Klan declares war against negro Jew communism. That was a banner headline from the Klan publication The Fiery Cross in 1961. I read that in the new book "Klansville, U.S.A.: The Rise and Fall of the Civil Rights-Era Ku Klux Klan" by my guest David Cunningham.

The book gives a historical overview of the Klan, then focuses on North Carolina, which in spite of its reputation as the region's most progressive state in the '60s was a Klan stronghold then. Cunningham is associate professor and chair of sociology in the Social Justice and Social Policy Program at Brandeis University. He's worked with the Greensboro, North Carolina, Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the Mississippi Truth Project.

via www.npr.org

Related articles

City Council Inundated With KKK Emails Following Park Name Change

NC Klansman sentenced on weapons and explosive charges

Debunking Blatchford and other anti-Native ideologues on Idle No More | rabble.ca

Okay, here's the link of the day for Raising Cain: a great Idle No More article by Harsha Walia at rabble.ca...I have also linked Blatchford's full article in the "related posts" section below the clip...

In her most recent piece, Blatchford has the audacity to refer to Chief Spence's action as "one of intimidation, if not terrorism." I am reminded of the words of Martin Luther King, "We who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to surface the hidden tension that is already alive." Blatchford provokes further, "there is I think a genuine question as to whether there's enough of Aboriginal Culture that has survived." Wrong, Blatchford. Indigenous peoples, cultures and nations have survived and thrived despite genocide -- despite a long, shameful and racist history of residential schools, forced sterilization, small pox and germ warfare, the breaking of treaties, legislative control including through the Gradual Civilization Act and the Indian Act, forced dispossession from lands and relocation to reservations, outlawing of ceremonies such as the potlatch and traditional activities such as fishing and hunting, and much more.

via rabble.ca

Also see:

Idle No More Is a Christmas Gift to Us All (Brigitte DePape, 12/25/12)

My Ally Bill of Responsibilities (Lynn Gehl)

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Lawrence Davidson: America's Ku Klux Klan Mentality

Lawrence Davidson's article addresses the dimension of increased hate group activity toward American Muslims as an element of ongoing racism in the United States...

While today the Ku Klux Klan as an organization is nearly (but not quite) gone, it would be a mistake to think that the Klan mentality is dead in the U.S. Quite the contrary. The nation’s deep-seated history of racism has helped preserve an apparent permanent subset of Americans who grow up with prejudicial feelings against anyone they perceive as a threat to their version of the “American way of life.”

This background can help us understand the  ongoing attacks against American Muslims.  Since 2010 there has been an increase in the number of attacks on American Muslims, their mosques and other property, as well as American minorities (such as Sikhs) who are regularly mistaken for Muslims.

These attacks are not the work of a refurbished Ku Klux Klan but, nonetheless, have about them the same nature: fear of American Muslims as cultural subversives (for instance, the delusion that they seek to impose Sharia law in the United States); anonymous threats of violence (via telephone, Internet, and also in the form of abusive graffiti); bomb, arson, and gun-fire attacks on property; and finally assaults and murders.

Read more of the story at www.alternet.org

Investigating Deaths of Undocumented Immigrants on the Border | Southern Poverty Law Center

Interesting article on Arizona immigration craziness from Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Report for September 2012:

The mountains near here rise as jagged and unforgiving obstacles on the horizon for immigrants and smugglers who cross the border by moonlight and make their way northward along the foothills, stopping in the cypress groves for rest. It’s a natural passage and the easiest route to travel.

But it was also here, on April 8, that a group of what was described as four white men wearing camouflage opened fire on a packed truck carrying immigrants illegally into the country, killing two of them. The victims, Gerardo Perez-Ruiz from the central Mexican city of Toluca and another man believed to be from Guatemala, were part of a group of 20 to 30 immigrants driving through a remote desert wash near Eloy when the group of gunmen suddenly appeared.

Read the full article at www.splcenter.org

Keli Goff: Why White Supremacists Have Embraced the War on Contraception

Good article from Keli Goff at Huffington Post:

So when I first began hearing murmurs that there may be more to the political battle over contraception than simply the usual culprits -- sexism, misogyny and political posturing -- I was skeptical. But as more and more people who I don't consider your usual, run-of-the-mill conspiracy nuts began mentioning one theory in particular regarding part of the motivation behind the battle over contraception, and the larger war on women in general, I began to wonder: Could they be on to something?

Now, thanks to my recent interviews with a prominent white supremacist and one of the nation's foremost experts on them, I don't have to wonder any longer. Let's just say that for some, the battle over birth control happens to align with a much bigger, long-term culture war. Not a culture war over religious freedom, as some would have you believe, but a war over the browning of America.

Read the whole article at www.huffingtonpost.com

Jeff Biggers: Arizona Senate President Pearce Has Been Recalled

Jeff Biggers -- who I first connected with via his writing on coal mining, mountaintop removal and environmental justice -- has been staying in touch with significant racial justice and immigrant rights issues in Arizona. Biggers has personal connections to Arizona that give his coverage an implicit, if not explicit, viewpoint. Here's an excerpt from his report  yesterday that Russell Pearce, who has been serving as  president of the Arizona State Senate, has been recalled:

In a swift affirmation of Arizona's fast-growing and powerful new political movement, Secretary of State Ken Bennett notified Gov. Jan Brewer that the once seemingly invincible architect of the state's controversial SB 1070 "papers please" immigration law has officially been recalled. Bennett confirmed that the recall petitions delivered by the Citizens for a Better Arizona "exceeds the minimum signatures required by the Arizona Constitution."

"Let's make no mistake about it," said Randy Parraz, co-founder of the Citizens for a Better Arizona. "Russell Pearce has been recalled."

According to Bennett's statement, Pearce has two options: Resign from office within five business days, or become a candidate in the recall election. Either way, Pearce becomes the first state senate president in recent memory to be recalled in the nation.

"No one expected this or picked up on this political earthquake," said Parraz, one of the main organizers behind the extraordinary grassroots campaign, which electrified a bipartisan effort in Pearce's Mesa district. Parraz credited a "dramatic shift" over the past six months due to Pearce's often extremist leadership in state senate.

via www.huffingtonpost.com