February 22, 2006 News & Views » Cover

Pin It
Submit to Reddit
Favorite

Still Divided 

50 years later, racial nightmares still haunt the South. Can we ever get past them?

Page 4 of 4

Lynchings and, in general, race violence weren't just retribution exacted for a crime. They were a statement of superiority. In the same way a man "puts down" a diseased dog, white society disposed of blacks who evidenced the peculiar affliction of straying from their "place." The murders were a clear message from one race to another: We have power over you. By cutting off blacks' genitals, the mob was denying the victims their right to participate in society as men.

"Emmett Till wasn't killed because society had a few deviants," the University of Miami's Jones says. "He was killed because of a system, and the foundations of that system exist today."

Thus, Till received what Southern society deemed a fitting and common penalty for insulting a white woman. During the Jim Crow decades, 3,446 blacks were lynched in the South, as well as well as 1,297 non-blacks -- mostly Jews, Catholics, civil rights workers from the North and others who had offended Southern sensibilities.

Georgia, with 531 victims, ranked number two in lynchings, behind only Mississippi with 581. Florida, with 282 murders, ranked seventh. North Carolina had 101 lynchings, number 13.

Those are "official" tallies. Many, many lynchings were private affairs, the crimes unrecorded, the victims denied even the humanity of an acknowledged death. In mass violence such as the 1906 Atlanta race riot, for which the centennial comes up in September, there are only estimates on the number slain -- somewhere between 20 and 40, perhaps more.

Similarly, the official death toll in the 1923 destruction of Rosewood, FL, by a white mob was pegged at six blacks and two whites. Other estimates put the number of blacks killed as high as 120. (In one of the few instances of justice for lynching victims, albeit delayed, the Florida legislature in 1994 approved $2.1 million for nine Rosewood survivors and scores of descendants because of the complicity of officials in letting the massacre happen.)

"We don't have the same society today," says Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, AL. "We do see a significant increase in white supremacist, white nationalist groups. But, no, we haven't seen a huge upswing in violence against African Americans, although there have been numerous incidents targeting immigrants."

Potok contends that factors such as the urbanization of much of the South and the influx of people from the North have pushed violent racism out of the South's mainstream and into the fringe. "You can't say everyone from the North is a liberal, but overall the trend is clear," he says. "The vast majority of people living in the South no longer accept racial violence, period."

Yet, one undeniable fact about Dixie is that we know the central story in our history.

The key question now is how to understand race and race-motivated violence, and then how to create a dialogue. Maybe then the South can move on.

Common understanding is the first step. We don't have that today, attested to by the race divide over, say, Georgia's voting rights law passed last year and then revised this year. Most whites applaud such legislation, while blacks perceive a threat. Similarly, when affluent Atlanta suburb Sandy Springs incorporated as a city last year, blacks saw it as another chapter in white flight, while the municipality's mostly white residents said they just wanted local control.

Roy Ennis, chairman of the Congress of Racial Equality, argued last summer during the Mississippi murder trial of a Ku Klux Klansman that the South -- the scene of so much racial violence -- is far better situated to deal with racism than the North.

"In the South, you can't be in denial about race," he said. "The South has had the drama. History won't allow [Southerners] to ignore the past."

But Ennis also warned that backsliding would be easy. "We know progress is fleeting. Do I think we'll see more race riots and lynchings? Yes, I do, unless America, led by the South, finally excises its horrible legacy."

Read More
Healing Old Wounds.
What do you think about race in the South?.

Full text

1 2 3 4

More Cover »

Tags: ,

Speaking of 4.67000

Pin It
Submit to Reddit
Favorite

Latest in Cover

Calendar

More »

Search Events

all events
concerts
restaurants
movie times

Most Popular
Most Shared
Most Commented

© 2019 Womack Digital, LLC
Powered by Foundation