It’s an image I can’t get away from, the idea of an American photo album with missing pages.
You see, I think that’s the point of months such as Black History Month (February) and Women’s History Month (March) — to acknowledge, if not restore, some missing pages of a complex past that still shapes our present and future. That’s why these commemorative months are for everyone, not only for the citizens they intend to celebrate.
The image of the American album is not mine. I came across it when I was researching what I thought this column would be, a piece about Ida B. Wells-Barnett.
I didn’t know much about her when I started, but I found out she was an African-American woman of great spirit, intelligence and courage, a crusading newspaperwoman (1862-1931) whose reporting about lynching put her in danger and exiled her from her Memphis home. She re-settled in Chicago, where she raised her family and continued her efforts for equal and civil rights until the day she died.
Given her Chicago connection, I thought I would tie in today’s Louisville visit of Barack Obama, the black U.S. senator from Chicago, Ill., whose run for the presidency of the United States is making headlines and gaining traction:
Look how far we’ve come — new Gallup poll shows that more Americans (94 percent) say they’d vote for a well-qualified black candidate for president, and a woman (88 percent), than they would for a 72-year-old candidate (57 percent) — and all that.
And then I found some of Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s work on the Internet, in which she told the story of a Georgia man named Samuel Wilkes (or Hose). He killed his white employer in an exchange gone wrong over wages (a detective’s report said Wilkes acted in self-defense), and was burned at the stake in 1899 by a mob of white men, whose actions were both predicted and provoked by incendiary Atlanta newspaper reports.
I had reached my 51st year knowing about lynching, having learned about Emmett Till, the 14-year-old from Chicago who made the fatal mistake of whistling at a white woman in Mississippi in 1955; having heard but not really listened to Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” (Southern trees bear strange fruit, Blood on the leaves and blood at the root, Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze, Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees); having lived in a community that actually had a road named Lynching Tree, which town fathers and mothers changed to the blander and less egregiously referenced Legendary Drive.
But until last week I had lived my whole life without reading Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s pamphlet, which told of many things, including how 2,000 people watched as Samuel Wilkes was forced to remove most of his clothes before he was fastened to a sapling. Then how he stood, conscious but without crying, as his torturers cut off his ears, and then scored his flesh with knives, and then set the fire that burned him to death. Even in death he was not left alone: Onlookers took his bones as keepsakes.
Ida B. Wells-Barnett wrote, “The burning of … Samuel Wilkes, gave to the United States the distinction of having burned alive seven human beings during the past 10 years. The details of this deed of unspeakable barbarism have shocked the civilized world, for it is conceded universally that no other nation on earth, civilized or savage, has put to death any human being with such atrocious cruelty as that inflicted on Samuel (Wilkes) by the Christian white people of Georgia.”
My education did not end there.
Ida B. Wells-Barnett and the story of Samuel Wilkes led me to James Allen, who is white, and a recent book titled Without Sanctuary, which contains his 30-year collection of lynching photographs, and his notion of an American photo album with missing pages.
Oftentimes, photographers were on hand at lynchings to record the proceedings, and some of their pictures were sold as souvenirs, and some of them became postcards that were sent through the mail, friend to friend, family member to family member, with notes jotted on the back.
These graphic photographs are largely missing from our collective American album.
When I phoned Allen last week at his home in Atlanta, I asked him why he thought that was, and his answer was at the ready:
Because they contradict the sense we have of ourselves as morally superior.
Allen’s book is a grim reminder that some of our own “mad citizenry,” in his words, shot, burned, tortured and hanged mostly people of color, or of “other” faiths, from coast to coast, from North to South. (Two lynchings are shown from Kentucky; several photos were taken in Indiana.)
And, it is a reminder that all this happened in the not-so-distant past and that proof remains, despite active or passive efforts to ignore it or remove it.
When I was talking to a friend about this, about how in 100 years’ time we have gone from burning a black man at the stake to a black man running for president of the United States and having a good shot of making it, the friend said that was like going from Kitty Hawk to the Moon within the span of a century.
And that’s true.
But — I think you have to know the distance you’ve traveled in order to appreciate the miracle of what’s been achieved or overcome.
I don’t think we know the full distance we’ve come, or how far there is to go.
How can we know, until and unless we look hard at where we’ve been and how that still is playing out in how we treat each other, and how we treat other people in the world?
Playing off the title of Allen’s work, we take false and unearned sanctuary in our willful ignorance of the full picture of who we were and are. And though we may want to cherry-pick what goes into our American family album, we can’t have Obama without Wilkes.
This reckoning is not an easy thing to do. As Allen wrote, “These photos provoke a strong sense of denial in me, and a desire to freeze my emotions. In time, I realize that my fear of the other is fear of myself. Then these portraits, torn from other family albums, become the portraits of my own family and of myself . . .”
I notice, in looking through Allen’s collection, two things:
Several of the lynching pictures were taken in Waco, Texas, the town in which I was born.
And one of the lifeless bodies at the end of a rope is that of James Clark, whose killing gave Lynching Tree Drive its name in the place I used to live. He was hanged on the day I would be born, 29 years later.
