Adult nonfiction
"'We orter kill more of 'em around here,' he amplified. Teach 'em a lesson. Only way to stop raping is to keep on lynching. I'm goner put this finger (which the speaker personally cut off the lynching victim while he was still alive) on exhibition in my store window tomorrow, boys, and I want you to drop around.'
He grinned again.
'And don't forget to bring the ladies."
June 26, 1919 in Mississippi in broad daylight in front of ten thousand whites a Black man accused of raping a white woman was dismembered, hung, shot, and burned. Children ran around. Politicians made speeches. Vendors sold souvenirs. The federal government did nothing.
"Governor Bilbo said that stopping 'the lynching of Negro rapists' was practically impossible.' He blamed the French for the increasing violence in the United States, claiming they had put ideas of equality in African American heads.
'This is a white man's country, with a white man's civilization and any dream on the part of the Negro race to share share social and political equality will be shattered in the end,' he said."
One of the most chilling infographics I have ever seen is at the beginning of Cameron Mcwhirter's Red Summer: The Summer of 1919 and the Awakening of Black America. It's a map of the race riots and lynchings between April and November of that year. There were a lot more than I ever imagined...and not all in the South.
The First World War had just ended. African American soldiers had served with courage and valor, had put their lives on the line for their country, had been treated as people of worth and dignity...only to return to a nation that reviled and despised them, a nation intent on keeping them "in their place."
Mcwhirter takes reader through the many gruesome incidents, combining vivid descriptions with extensive backstory and the opinions of the major players back then. His book is extremely thought provoking and disturbing. It's more of that American history that didn't make it into out whitewashed high school textbooks.
Jules Hathaway
Sent from my U.S.Cellular© Smartphone
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