“I have seen a man hanged… now I wished I could see one burned.”
– An unnamed nine-year-old boy speaking to his mother.
“Back in those days, to kill a Negro wasn’t nothing. It was like killing a chicken or killing a snake. The whites would say ‘Niggers jest supposed to die, ain’t no damn good anyway- jest go and kill them’.”
– Black Mississippian recalling white violence in the 1930’s.
“In those days it was ‘Kill a mule, buy another. Kill a nigger, hire another,’ and ‘They had to have a license to kill anything but a nigger. We was always in season’.”
– Black southerner (name unknown)
My Dear Readers,
Four weeks ago, I traveled approximately 2700 miles to Montgomery, Alabama to visit The National Lynching Memorial (also known by its formal name The National Memorial for Peace & Justice). The focus of my visit was to bear witness. Too often bearing witness is focused on one’s success or the value of one’s work, this was to bear witness to the atrocities people can commit.
The National Lynching Memorial was created by the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) on a six-acre site in downtown Montgomery, Alabama. The memorial opened to the public on April 25, 2018. The memorial consists of 805 hanging steel rectangles, each the size and shape of coffins. Each of the hanging “coffins” represent each of the counties and their states where a documented lynching took place. More than 4075 documented lynchings of Black people took place between 1877 and 1950, with the majority being concentrated in 12 Southern states, though many did occur outside of the South.
In visiting The National Lynching Memorial, it was my intent to bear witness to acts of inhumanity. Whereas where others attempt to deny, evade, avoid, or distract… when one bears witness to something, it is the act of affirming the “something” or the actions exists, or “something” and the actions happened.
In bearing witness, being physically present, it was intended to extend the expression of love and respect to those who endured suffering, torture, and full awareness of their impending deaths at the hands of the rage of White violence.
My act of bearing witness is intended to achieve three objectives:
- Uncovering the truth about the action of lynching, the reasons, and justifications.
- Discovering and sharing through bringing understanding with the intent to encourage dialogue.
- Recovering and healing of the psychological wounds that continue via the transmission of intergenerational and transgenerational trauma
Uncovering the Truth
There is a falseness in the perceptions of what is a lynching. The common misunderstanding is the theme that a lynching is “death by hanging”. The NAACP, a civil rights organization well experienced with lynchings, provided the follow definition:
“A lynching is a public killing of an individual who has not received any due process. These executions were often carried out by lawless mobs, though police officers did participate, under the pretext of justice.”
Lynchings were violent public acts that White people used to terrorize and control Black people in the 19th and 20th centuries, particularly in the South. Lynchings typically evoke images of Black men and women hanging from trees, but they involved other extreme brutality, such as torture, mutilation, decapitation, and desecration. Some victims were even burned alive.
An example of a lynching was in 1949, when Ernest Thomas was shot over 400 times by a mob of hundreds of white men while he was asleep under a tree in Madison County, Florida. Two days after his death, coroner’s jury deemed it as “justifiable homicide”.
Lynchings in America were not isolated hate crimes committed by rogue vigilantes. Lynchings were targeted racial violence perpetrated to uphold an unjust social order.
This era left thousands dead; significantly marginalized black people politically, financially, and socially; and inflicted deep trauma on the entire African American community. White people who witnessed, participated in and socialized their children in a culture that tolerated gruesome lynchings also were psychologically damaged.
State officials’ tolerance of lynching created enduring national and institutional wounds that have not healed. Lynchings occurred in communities where African Americans today remain marginalized, disproportionately poor, overrepresented in prisons and jails and underrepresented in decision making roles in the criminal justice system.
Discovering and Sharing
Black lynching victims killed between 1877 and 1950 primarily died in the 12 Southern states, with Mississippi, Georgia, and Louisiana among the deadliest. Several hundred additional victims were lynched in other regions including Michigan, Minnesota, Indiana, Wisconsin, and New York, with the highest numbers in Oklahoma, Missouri, Illinois, and West Virginia.
Some lynching victims were targeted for their efforts to organize Black communities for political and economic equality. Others were lynched for refusing to address a White man as “sir” or demanding to be served at the counter in a segregated soda shop. Hundreds were lynched based on accusations of offenses like arson, robbery, non-sexual assault, and vagrancy. In a strictly maintained racial caste system, White lives and White property held higher value, while the lives of Black people held little or none.
Nearly 25% of African Americans lynching victims were accused of sexual assault and 30% were accused of murder. Because African Americans were presumed guilty and dangerous, accusations lodged against them were rarely scrutinized. Nearly all were lynched without an investigation, much less a trial. Efforts to pass federal anti-lynching legislation repeatedly failed because of opposition by Southern elected officials. Only 1% of lynchings committed after 1900 led to a criminal conviction.
With no protection from the constant threat of death, nearly six million black Americans fled the South between 1910 and 1970. Many left homes, families, and employment to flee racial terror as traumatized refugees. Lynching profoundly reshaped the geographic, political, social, and economic conditions of African Americans today.
Recovering and Healing: The Impacts of Psychological Trauma via Transmission
There are two types of transmission: intergenerational and transgenerational. In intergenerational trauma, the trauma gets passed down from those who directly experienced the traumatic incident while in transgenerational trauma, the descendants were not directly exposed to the incident.
African Americans continue to be impacted by generational trauma caused by extreme events, abuses, or prolonged periods of difficult times. Trauma is believed to pass from one generation to the next through genetic changes to a person’s DNA after they experienced trauma and continue to pass forward to a person’s offspring.
Concluding Statement: Psychological Trauma – The Elephant in the Room
Psychological trauma has permanence… meaning, the event, the incident or experience is permanently etched within the psychological self. There are times in which the trauma incident, the elephant, screams loudly seeking attention. The response can be seeking support that would bring advocacy, balance, and calmness to those difficult times when intrusive thoughts and feelings could surface.
The horrors of the lynching era cannot be dismissed. We do not have to live in the shadows of fear. We can live in peace with full understanding of the past era.
My Dear Readers,
I hold no malice or hate in my heart. I have taken from this holy site wisdom, understanding and concern as I continue to provide clinical psychotherapy to those impacted by psychological trauma.
May those who suffered so harshly, meeting death alone by the cold hearts of their fellow humans, now find rest and do so …peacefully.”
Strange Fruit Song by Billie Holiday
Southern trees bear a strange fruit
Blood on the leaves and blood on the root
Black bodies swinging in the southern breezes
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees
Pastoral scene of the gallant South
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth
Scent of magnolia, sweet of burning flesh
Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck
For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop
Here is a strange and bitter crop.
(lyrics by Abel Meeropol)
Standing Alone…. The Unspoken Truth
Loving Me More 