Ida B. Wells (1862-1931) was a newspaper editor and journalist who went on to lead the American anti-lynching crusade. Working closely with both African-American community leaders and American suffragists, Wells worked to raise gender issues within the "Race Question" and race issues within the "Woman Question." In her "Crusade for Justice" (1928), she wrote (source for the following quotes: www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk)
"I also found that what the white man of the South practiced as all right for himself, he assumed to be unthinkable in white women. They could and did fall in love with the pretty mulatto and quadroon girls as well as black ones, but they professed an inability to imagine white women doing the same thing with Negro and mulatto men. Whenever they did so and were found out, the cry of rape was raised, and the lowest element of the white South was turned loose to wreak its fiendish cruelty on those too weak to help themselves. No torture of helpless victims by heathen savages or cruel red Indians ever exceeded the cold-blooded savagery of white devils under lynch law. This was done by white men who controlled all the forces of law and order in their communities and who could have legally punished rapists and murderers, especially black men who had neither political power nor financial strength with which to evade any justly deserved fate. The more I studied the situation, the more I was convinced that the Southerner had never gotten over his resentment that the Negro was no longer his plaything, his servant, and his source of income".
In the brief article "Confronting the Past" (17th February, 2000), Roger Rosenblatt considers a series of photographs on lynchings in America, exhibited at Roth Horowitz Gallery in Manhattan and in the book "Without Sanctuary":
"That ordinary people did these things is deeply disturbing; that they manufactured a social rationale for their acts is more disturbing still. Look for a while at the picture of the lynching of Rubin Stacy, Fort Lauderdale, Florida, 1930. Look first at Stacy, then turn to the little girl in the summer dress, looking at Stacy, and then to the man behind her, perhaps her father, in the spotless white shirt and slacks and the clean white skimmer. They will stand there forever, admiring the proof of their civilization".
Congressman John Lewis writes in the Introduction to "Without Sanctuary": "Many people today, despite the evidence, will not believe-don't want to believe-that such atrocities happened in America not so very long ago. These phototgraphs bear witness to ...an American holocaust".
It is this aspect of the American lynchings, the banalization and socialization of evil, what disturbs many the most. Lynchings, despite being illegal, were carried out in public places, drew masses and were a momento to remember in postcards sent to the family. Kids watched the burning of the flesh, young couples cuddled at the warm light of the pyre, elegant white men in suits and hats (symbols of social distinction at the time) posed, proud, with their victims, casting a smile. The whole town enjoyed a celebratory social event.
While the Nazis were conducting their crematories for Jews like business, orderly and casually, Americans were perpretating their own Holocaust against fellow Americans and making of it a party. Those Southern soldiers that fought the Nazis in Europe would come back to Alabama or Georgia to witness a lynching in the Land of Freedom and Democracy. As Roger Rosenblatt puts it: "Glimpses of human depravity take on even greater horror when they are attached to a system, when they are civilized". What we in Europe would think of primitive, sadistic assassinations and sadistic brutality was but the law of the common man in many states of America (slavery, lynching, segregation).
Rosenblatt writes: "One of the postcards reads: "This is the barbecue we had last night." The barbecue was a man". America, the cradle of modern civilization, behaving like a Prehistoric subhuman.
"There was both formality and method to these atrocities: Red hot pokers applied to eyes and genitals; bodies roasted over flames; souvenirs of fingers, toes and ears taken by the crowds". Not even the bones after the human cooking were left to rest in peace, and were fastly collected by the excited mobs, who dressed in their nicest for the occasion (and yet this is the country that cries against public executions in Iran). Harry Truman was ending the war by nuclear-bombing civilians and being knighted as member of the Ku Klux Klan. America, Land of the Free.
Despite the hopes of the NAACP in his presidency and the being his wife Eleanor a long-time opponent of lynching, President Franklin D. Roosevelt refused in 1935 to speak out in favour of a bill that would punish sheriffs who failed to protect their prisoners from lynch mobs. He argued that the white voters in the South would never forgive him if he supported the bill and he would therefore lose the next election ( http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAlynching.htm).
Arthur Raper wrote for the Southern Commission on the Study of Lynching in 1933:
"3,724 people were lynched in the United States from 1889 through to 1930. Over four-fifths of these were Negroes, less than one-sixth of whom were accused of rape. Practically all of the lynchers were native whites. The fact that a number of the victims were tortured, mutilated, dragged, or burned suggests the presence of sadistic tendencies among the lynchers. Of the tens of thousands of lynchers and onlookers, only 49 were indicted and only 4 have been sentenced."
Mississipi Democratic (Southern Style) Representative James Eastland said in his speech in the United States Senate (27th May, 1954):
"Separation promotes racial harmony. It permits each race to follow its own pursuits, and its own civilization. Segregation is not discrimination. Segregation is not a badge of racial inferiority, and that it is not is recognized by both races in the Southern States. In fact, segregation is desired and supported by the vast majority of the members of both races in the South, who dwell side by side under harmonious conditions.
Let me make this clear, Mr. President: There is no racial hatred in the South. The Negro race is not an oppressed race."
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James Cameron (1914) is the only survivor known of an attempted lynching: he escaped, rope around his neck, of a mob-and-Klan lynch in Marion, Indiana, in 1930, when he was 16. He has since then found the Black Holocaust Museum in Milwaukee and relentessly spread his story, that of state-sponsored terrorism of Americans against Americans.
For most present-day Americans, this awful, shameful past does not count, probably does not even exist, forgotten or never told. My explorations in the history of my new country horrify and shame me. As much as I love America, our murderous, barbaric past represents a struggle to live with, a profound calamity that makes the being an American a mentally complicated task.
Germany has made of its life after 1945 a continous, painful and tortuous process of never-ending pardon, reflection and guilt over the Nazi era. Nothing seems exempt in Germany of being analyzed in the context of a post-Holocaust country, and the society appears to live in constant struggle with such a burdensome, shameful past. America has done none of that and only now seems to timidly present (in form of books and films, never officially) some of the harrowing events that shaped our criminal history.
The Black Holocaust has not yet achieved the deserved status of a state-sponsored race murder mourned and observed nation-wide; it's time for scholars, historians and politicians to start acting German-style, and beyond the Civil Rights' monuments: live with the pain, remember the shame, ask for forgiveness, repair the victims, institutionalize the nation's regrets for our savage actions against fellow Americans in the past.
Slavery, riots, lynchings, torture, assassination, hate, massacre of innocents: against silence and oblivion, history and truth must be spoken out and remembered in the present, and the future to come. For I love America.
