A few descendants of Elwood Higginbotham, who was lynched by a mob in 1935, try to learn about what happened back in Mississippi. Higginbotham was "one of at least 4,100 African-Americans who were lynched between 1877 and 1950 in 12 states clustered along the curve from Virginia to Texas."
The essay's timing is not any random occurrence. Thanks to Bryan Stevenson, a civil rights attorney and founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, "the country’s first memorial to lynching victims, alongside a museum to racial injustice" has opened in Montgomery, Alabama. As Stevenson puts it:
We’re just finding our voice, many of us, to insist on truth telling. And my view on truth and reconciliation is that it’s sequential. You can’t get to reconciliation until you first get to truth.Perhaps the current president would shrug his shoulders and exclaim that there were fine people on both sides. He would even fault the late Higginbotham for having brought this upon himself! Other than him and his 63 million voters, the rest of us want to honestly engage with this dark past and reconcile.
Stevenson points to the German experience on truth and reconciliation:
“In Berlin, you can’t go anywhere without seeing stones and markers dedicated to the Jewish and Roma residents who were forced from their homes and taken to the concentration camps,” Stevenson said. “And that iconography creates a consciousness of what happened that I think is necessary for that society to recover. In the American South, we’ve done the opposite. We’ve actually created symbols designed to make us feel great about our history, about the 19th century, about the good old days of the early 20th century.”It is a shame that we do not have a national museum on slavery. It is a disgrace that we do not even want to engage in honest discussions on this "original sin." Discussions that can, once and for all, lead to reconciliation instead of the continuing simmering of those issues.
In the essay, I came across a reference to a poem by the Senegalese poet Birago Diop, “Those Who Are Dead Are Never Gone.” I searched for and read it on a website, and will wrap up this post with that poem:
Those Who Are Dead Are Never Gone
By Birago Diop
Those who are dead are never gone:
They are there in the thickening shadow.
The dead are not under the earth:
they are in the tree that rustles,
they are in the wood that groans,
they are in the water that sleeps,
they are in the hut,
they are in the crowd,
the dead are not dead.
Those who are dead are never gone,
they are in the breast of the woman,
they are in the child who is wailing
and in the firebrand that flames.
The dead are not under the earth:
they are in the fire that is dying,
they are in the grasses that weep,
they are in the whimpering rocks,
they are in the forest,
they are in the house,
the dead are not dead.
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| At the Whitney Plantation |
