Lynchings happened across the U.S., including the 1916 lynching of Jesse Washington in Waco, Texas. Shutterstock
Between 1850 and 1950, thousands of African American men, women and children were victims of lynchings: public torture and killings carried out by white mobs.
Lynchings were used to terrorize and control black people, notably in the South following the end of slavery.
More recently, in April 2019, the state of Maryland established a truth commission to investigate the lynchings of at least 40 African Americans between 1854 and 1933.
The commission has the potential to educate the public about dozens of lynchings – some of which occurred with the knowledge or direct involvement of local, county and state government entities. The commission can also provide the opportunity for reconciliation between the families of those who were responsible and the families of those who were killed.
I study human rights, with a particular interest in institutions that hold individuals, organizations and governments accountable for human rights abuses. My current research focuses on truth commissions and how they can be designed to be effective.
A truth commission is a temporary body that investigates different forms and systems of violence that happened in the past. Examples include the commissions that investigated apartheid in South Africa, the civil war in Timor-Leste and the dictatorship in Chile.
Generally, governments establish commissions to examine documents and collect witness testimony. A key goal of commissions is preparing a report that details the facts and traces the legacies of violence and abuse. A second, related goal is reconciliation. In Maryland’s case, this would mean working toward respect, understanding and trust of those of other races and their experiences.
Based on my research and analyses of truth commissions in Chile, South Africa and Timor-Leste, I believe that the commission in Maryland has the potential to succeed.
But it faces some big obstacles.
Truth commissions in the US
The commission in Maryland will not be the first in the U.S.
In addition, there have been commissions at the local level – for example, the 2004 commission in North Carolina that examined the killing of five anti-Ku Klux Klan demonstrators in Greensboro in 1979. There have also been commissions at the state level – for example, the 2013 commission in Maine that investigated the separation of indigenous Wabanaki children from their communities since 1960.
However, the commission in Maryland will be the first to research lynchings, which investigative journalist Ida B. Wells in 1909 called the U.S.‘s “national crime.”
I have found in my research that a commission needs support from politicians, access to information, and community knowledge and involvement. It appears that the commission in Maryland has – or will have – each of these characteristics. In this regard, it is similar to previous successful commissions.
First, similar to South Africa, the commission has support from politicians on both sides of the aisle – in this case, Democrats and Republicans. Bipartisan support affords the commission public legitimacy as it seeks access to court records, historical archives, and local and statewide newspapers. So, it may be harder to politicize the commission’s work.
Second, as in Timor-Leste, where the commission held hearings in the villages where violence occurred, the commission in Maryland will hold hearings across the state, including in communities where lynchings occurred.
By operating throughout the state, the commission can more easily reach victims’ descendants and collect their stories. Collecting information from as many sources as possible is important to ascertain the truth.
In addition, the commission will be well positioned to broadly share its work and findings, through the hearings themselves, local news reporting and more. This is key to both truth and reconciliation.
Getting families and the wider community involved in this aspect can help provide healing and closure. For more than a century, the pain and trauma they experienced went unacknowledged.
Now, not only does Maryland have the potential to address this pain and trauma, it has the opportunity to memorialize the lynchings so others, too, can know what happened.
Obstacles to truth and reconciliation
There are, I believe, obstacles that may prevent the commission from accomplishing all of its goals.
To start, the commission’s limited focus may lead to limited reconciliation. Lynchings represent just one form – the most extreme form – of race-based discrimination and violence.
Other forms – which persist today – include the over-policing, over-criminalization, and mass incarceration of African Americans. The commission hasn’t been designed to address these issues or the broader context of racism and violence. So, it’s unclear how the commission will lead to widespread reconciliation.
In addition, while the families of those responsible for lynchings can work with the commission and take the opportunity to make amends to the victims’ families and communities, they may decline to do so. And victims’ families may not be prepared to forgive.
Finally, the commission has been created in a fraught social and political environment. Hate crimes have increased in recent years throughout the U.S. Some elected officials have trivialized racial violence – including lynchings. And some race-focused policies, such as reparations, are widely unpopular among Americans.
So, while the commission benefits from broad support from government leaders in Maryland, it may not enjoy similar support from the public.
Whether the obstacles I describe will overcome the strengths of the commission remains to be seen. Nevertheless, the commission represents an important first step and offers a guide for similar efforts in other states.
In December 1941, a few days after the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the U.S. entry into World War II, a Detroit mother named Sylvia Tucker visited her local Red Cross donor center to give blood.
Having heard the “soul-stirring” appeals for blood donors on her radio, she was determined to do her part. But when she arrived at the center, the supervisor turned her away. “Orders from the National Offices,” he explained, “barred Negro blood donors at this time.”
“Shocked” and “grieved,” Tucker left in tears, later penning a letter of protest about the whole ordeal to first lady Eleanor Roosevelt.
Today, this discriminatory blood program and African-Americans’ determined opposition to it are long forgotten, despite the fact that a few scholars, including Spencie Love, Susan E. Lederer, Sarah E. Chinn, and myself, have explored the topic.
This history is worth remembering. It provides an antidote to facile, feel-good stories about the “Good War,” stories that scholars such as Michael C.C. Adams and Kenneth D. Rose have long refuted but that live on in museum exhibits, blockbuster films, best-selling books and war memorials.
The story of how blood got desegregated also reminds Americans that, as novelist Ralph Ellison wrote nearly a half-century ago, “The black American … puts pressure upon the nation to live up to its ideals.”
Historian Robin D.G. Kelley puts it more broadly: “The marginal and excluded have done the most to make democracy work in America.”
In an age of resurgent racism, Ellison’s and Kelley’s words are especially important and timely.
‘A tremendous thing’
The Red Cross Blood Donor Program began in early 1941 – and went on to collect blood from millions of Americans that the military shipped to soldiers fighting overseas.
“If I could reach all America,” asserted General Dwight D. Eisenhower at the end of the war, “there is one thing I would like to do – thank them for blood plasma and whole blood. It has been a tremendous thing.”
Tremendous indeed: The blood program saved many lives. But it also initially excluded African-American donors like Sylvia Tucker. When it did accept them, in January 1942, it did so on a segregated basis.
Charles Drew (1904-1950) Howard University. Moorland-Spingarn Research Center
Never mind that scientists saw no relationship between race and blood and that one of the world’s leading authorities on blood banking at the time, and the director of the Red Cross’s pilot blood program, was an African-American scientist named Dr. Charles Drew. Never mind that Nazi Germany had its own Aryan-only blood policy or that America’s principal rhetorical war aims concerned democracy and freedom.
To what extent military commanders segregated blood in the field was, during the war and afterwards, a matter of some debate. Officially, at least, the distinction between bloods remained in place for years. It was not until 1950 that the Red Cross stopped requiring the segregation of so-called Negro blood. And it was not until the late 1960s and early 1970s that Southern states such as Arkansas and Louisiana overturned similar requirements.
A forgotten civil rights struggle
In one internal memorandum, the Red Cross called its donor program democratic, since “the point of view of the majority … ” – which its leaders assumed demanded blood segregation – “must be taken into account in a democracy.”
But many blacks and their allies had a very different idea about democracy, one that required all citizens be treated equally and without regard to race. They fought tirelessly throughout the war years to make that idea a reality, not simply in the military, in the workplace and in Hollywood films but also in the blood program.
These many battles constituted a nascent, surging, and, today, too-often-overlooked civil rights struggle that helped pave the way for the more famous movement of the postwar years.
Nearly all the major civil rights organizations of the day, including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the March on Washington Movement and even the upstart Committee (later, Congress) of Racial Equality, made changing blood policy a top priority. One statement from a group of the nation’s most prominent black leaders put it this way:
“In justice to what we know to be the practically unanimous sentiment among Negroes in America, we affirm the need for alteration of the segregated blood plasma policy.”
Black newspapers, enormously popular and important at time, also protested blood segregation and exclusion, regularly featuring front-page stories, boldface headlines and blistering editorials on the subject.
In January 1942, for example, the African-American weekly the Cleveland Call and Post published an “editorial in rhyme”:
“The cross of Red, that burned so bright
In fire, storm and flood
Is now the crooked Nazi sign
That spurns a Negro blood!”
Wide-ranging activists
Activism on this issue extended well beyond these traditional places.
Labor unions, Christian and Jewish groups, local interracial committees, scientific organizations and the New Jersey State Legislature all spoke out against blood segregation.
The Communist Party of Cuyahoga County in Ohio held a rally of 3,500 people, condemning blood policy as “Barbarian Hitlerism.”
An interracial group of precocious junior high schoolers at Harlem’s Public School 43 tested (with the help of their science teachers) the blood of a black student and of a white student. Finding no difference, they wrote an article in the school paper, made and distributed hundreds of posters, and held a public meeting – all in opposition to the Red Cross policy.
The most widespread form of protest, however, came from thousands of ordinary African-Americans who refused to donate blood and money to the Red Cross.
While roughly 10 percent of the U.S. population at the time, blacks made up less than 1 percent of all blood donors.
African-Americans contributed generously to the Treasury Department’s Defense Bonds: It is not a lack of patriotism that explains their halfhearted response to blood drives. The reason was a determined opposition to race-based exclusion and segregation.
Expressing these feelings best was a high school student from Cleveland named Geraldyne Ghess. Her poem appeared in the local black newspaper:
Had I wealth, I’d burn it all;
Not one cent for the Red Cross call.
Our money is good … our blood is bad.
But, still that shouldn’t make us mad.
Are they afraid they’ll all turn black?
Is that why our blood they lack?
Their skins are white as snow … it’s well.
Their souls are tarnished, black as hell.
In the end, this wide-ranging activism may have failed to democratize the blood program fully – at least during the war.
But African-Americans did – in the end – force the Red Cross to include them as donors.
Full-fledged integration, which took a few more years, owed everything to their work.
Editor’s note: This is an updated version of a story originally published Feb. 12, 2015.
A rare exception is Anne Moody’s “Coming of Age in Mississippi,” which was published in 1968. It spoke to the day’s pressing issues – poverty, race and civil rights – with an urgent timeliness.
Fifty years later, the book still commands a wide readership. Read each year by thousands of high school and college students, it remains a Random House backlist best-seller – a title that continues to sell with little to no marketing.
As I research Anne Moody’s life for my upcoming biography, I often wonder what her memoir’s continued popularity means. Does it signal dramatic progress on race relations in the U.S. – or does it instead show us that, as former Sen. Ted Kennedy wrote in 1969, “If things are somewhat different, then they are not different enough.”
Till’s death opens Moody’s eyes
Written when Moody was 28 years old, “Coming of Age” is a gripping story. In spare, direct prose, she takes readers into the world of African-American sharecroppers in the Jim Crow South. As a child, she chopped and picked cotton, cleaned houses for white people, and wondered why whites had better everything – better bathrooms, better schools and better seats in the movie theater.
That mystery remained unsolved when, in 1955, Moody learned that white men had killed a black boy her age just a few hours’ drive north. The killing felt personal.
“Before Emmett Till’s murder, I had known the fear of hunger, hell, and the Devil,” she wrote. “But now there was … the fear of being killed just because I was black.”
Closer to home, whites ran her cousin out of town, brutally beat a classmate, and burned an entire family alive in their home. Amid such horrors, Moody feared a nervous breakdown.
But she resolved to resist.
In 1963, Moody became infamous in Mississippi after she challenged racial segregation in what would be the era’s most violent lunch-counter sit-in. At the Woolworth’s in Jackson, Mississippi, white men shoved Moody off her stool, dragged her across the floor by her hair and, when she crawled back, smeared her with ketchup, sugar and mustard.
Photographer Fred Blackwell captured a now-iconic image of this day, with Moody seated in the middle.
Anne Moody endures harassment from a crowd of whites at a Woolworth’s in Jackson, Miss. Fred Blackwell/Jackson Daily News, via Associated Press
In the early 1960s, Moody worked tirelessly as an organizer for the Congress of Racial Equality in Canton, Mississippi. But after facing daily death threats, she fled to the North, where she moved from city to city, raising money for the movement.
At each stop, she described what it was like to come of age, as a black woman, in Mississippi. At one, she shared a stage with baseball great Jackie Robinson, who urged her to write down her story.
So she did.
Readers react
After “Coming of Age in Mississippi” was published, the response was split.
Some readers viewed the book as – in the words of one reviewer for The New Republic – a “measure of how far we have come.” To them, the worst of racism was over, and Moody’s account served as a stark reminder of how bad things once were.
Many readers praised Moody’s story. Many in her home state, however, spurned it. Dell
Others, however, read Moody’s experiences of racism as simply one chapter in a current and ongoing struggle – “the sickening story of the way it still is for thousands who are black in the American South,” as Robert Colby Nelson wrote for The Christian Science Monitor.
Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy read it both ways.
He called the memoir “a history of our time, seen from the bottom up, through the eyes of someone who decided for herself that things had to be changed.” Still, he regretted that the book did not mention recent advances, like the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which enabled the election of several black public officials in Moody’s own hometown.
Meanwhile, for decades, Southern media outlets and public institutions shunned “Coming of Age in Mississippi” and Anne Moody herself. Hostile whites in Moody’s hometown of Centreville, Mississippi even threatened to kill her if she ever returned.
How much has really changed?
By contrast, today, “Coming of Age” shows up on high school and college reading lists throughout the South, and Anne Moody appears among 21 authors pictured on the Mississippi Literary Map. Her crumbling childhood home sits on the recently renamed Anne Moody Street and Anne Moody Memorial Highway, which now connects Centreville and Woodville, the town where she graduated from high school.
In Moody’s day, local public officials were all white. Now they more closely reflect the county’s 75 percent black population.
In 1963, Moody mourned the assassination of her beloved colleague, Medgar Evers, president of the state National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and watched in horror as local whites refused to convict his murderer. Thirty years later, Byron De La Beckwith was finally convicted of homocide and imprisoned for life. Today, visitors who fly into the Mississippi state capital, land at Jackson-Evers International Airport.
These shifts make “Coming of Age” seem, to many readers, an inspiring account of survival, resistance and victory.
But to others, the book is anything but a triumphalist story. Instead, its lessons are grim: In retrospect, civil rights victories seem superficial, while the brutal poverty and racism Moody described endures.
Anne Moody was one of the lucky ones. She graduated from college, moved north and published a best-selling memoir.
But despite the accolades, television appearances, radio interviews and speaking engagements, she could never really escape Jim Crow Mississippi. It had deprived her of her family and a place to truly call home.
“Coming of Age” ends with Moody listening to civil rights workers sing the anthem, “We Shall Overcome.”
“I wonder,” she wrote. “I really wonder.”
Fifty years later, many of us are still wondering.
I’m not a particularly big sports fan unless my kids are in the game, but back in the day I really did want to be like Mike. Fast forward a few decades and one of our writers, Jelani Greenidge, had me absolutely convinced that LeBron James and his big heart for education made him the true GOAT of any sport. But now I’m seeing God’s hand in an athlete of a different brand — Colin Kaepernick. A man of faith who reportedly believes “God guides me through every day and helps me take the right steps and has helped me to get to where I’m at,” Kaepernick and his new Nike deal as the new face of the ‘Just Do It’ campaign shows a shrewdness that feels like God’s hand at work. Okay, some may say I’m overreaching a tad with this Nike/God connection, but I truly believe Kaepernick has ascended from being a fighting symbol of social justice who maybe would have earned a paragraph in a history book for drawing the ire of King Trump to someone you’ll be telling your grandkids about.
For decades, a burning question loomed over a towering 20th-century book: “The Autobiography of Malcolm X”: What happened to the reputedly missing chapters that may have contained some of the most explosive thoughts of the African-American firebrand assassinated in 1965?
The answer came on Thursday when an unpublished manuscript of a chapter titled “The Negro” was sold by Guernsey’s auction house in Manhattan — for $7,000.
“We are like the Western deserts; tumbleweed, rolling and tumbling whichever way the white wind blows,” he writes. “And the white man is like the cactus, deeply rooted, with spines to keep us off.”
The buyer was The New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, based in Harlem.
Schomburg Director Kevin Young confirmed to The Associated Press that this was in fact an unpublished missing section of Malcom X’s autobiography, whose 241-page draft the Schomburg also acquired Thursday for an undisclosed sum.
The manuscript of the autobiography was for years owned by Gregory Reed, a lawyer for Rosa Parks who purchased the collection from author Alex Haley’s estate.
The draft of the entire book is of immense value, beyond the historic, for the handwritten revisions and comments by Malcolm X and Haley, Young said in a telephone interview after the auction.
Their dialogue, in writing, reflects the human rights activism of the Muslim minister who indicted white America for what he saw as criminal behavior against blacks; opponents including the U.S. government accused him of inciting racism and violence. He was assassinated in Harlem in 1965 by three members of the Nation of Islam, a radical religious movement, shortly after he had broken away from the group.
The scribbled notes in the manuscript — not available until now — “are a very direct narrative that he’s crafting,” says Young, citing the image of racist cross-burning that Malcolm X’s mother described to him as a child. “And that’s what brings him into the world.”
One mystery was solved in public on Thursday, but another was born: loose fragments of Malcolm’s writing-in-the-works. Were these parts of possible other missing chapters?
“I examined them, and I don’t know what those are, it’s too early to tell; they look like they were probably stapled at one time, or cut and pasted; some are half of a page, or just slips of paper,” Young said. “The best way to describe them is that they’re literal fragments and literary fragments.”
It may take years before the story of the fragments is pieced together.
“You see in these pages the history of black people in America,” concluded Young. “And we’re bringing the sons and daughters of Harlem home.”
