or, Using History as a Weapon for ... Revenge.
I don't quite understand why editorials like this one, and last week's column by Charles Blow about Emmett Till's death, are being taught as if the writers are just learning the details of history.
Didn't everyone learn about Emmett Till in 7th grade American history, or was that a Chicago-area thing? Ditto today's NYT editorial. Are some portions of the population just learning that blacks were once enslaved in this country? Is this knowledge new in some way?
Even in the early 20th century, civil rights groups documented cases in which African-Americans died horrible deaths after being turned away from hospitals reserved for whites, or were lynched — which meant being hanged, burned or dismembered — in front of enormous crowds that had gathered to enjoy the sight.
The Charleston church massacre has eerie parallels to the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala. — the most heinous act of that period — which occurred at the height of the early civil rights movement. Four black girls were murdered that Sunday. When Dr. King eulogized them, he did not shy away from the fact that the dead had been killed because they were black, by monstrous men whose leaders fed them “the stale bread of hatred and the spoiled meat of racism.” He said that the dead “have something to say” to a complacent federal government that cut back-room deals with Southern Dixiecrats, as well as to “every Negro who has passively accepted the evil system of segregation and who has stood on the sidelines in a mighty struggle for justice.” Shock over the bombing pushed Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act the following year.
During this same period, freedom riders and voting rights activists led by the young John Lewis offered themselves up to be beaten nearly to death, week after week, day after day, in the South so that the country would witness Jim Crow brutality and meaningfully respond to it. This grisly method succeeded in Selma, Ala., in 1965 when scenes of troopers bludgeoning voting rights demonstrators compelled a previously hesitant Congress to acknowledge that black people deserved full citizenship, too, and to pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Along the way, there was never a doubt as to what the struggle was about: securing citizenship rights for black people who had long been denied them.
Are the writers so passionate because they are only learning these historical details now? Is the goal to keep blacks of today in their place, forever shackled to their past role in American history? Why do well-meaning (I think) wealthy white people want to encourage anger over past history, what most people take in as educational material, not a personal slight passed down through the ages?
Every culture overcomes.
It's the American way, especially.
I understand the anger and nihilism of a Te-Nehisi Coates, for example. Ill educated, raised by a former black panther at-home father, with little formal religious teaching and a deliberate rejection of communal holidays... he IS just learning some of historical facts of his roots, and he burns up the pages sharing what he's learning.
People buy it too.
But the rest of us?
The supposedly representative NYT board?
Don't they understand, history class is where we report details of days part, that's why it is called history. American history, black and white. Newspapers are for current events, what is taking place out there today. Reporters write on bird-cage linings, not books. Journalism of the times passes into history, and we learn facts without the accompanying emotion or passionate interplay.
You can't rewrite history, no matter how hard you try.
And you can't breathe life back into either, changing things.
You have to learn, preferably early, to accept your history lessons, and learn from them.
It's sad that the lack of education in so many places leads to such unchanneled ignorance that fuels anger.
Today, nobody's being lynched, for example.
That's not news. But you are getting calls -- and responses -- like what happened last week in Minnesota at the communal annual celebration, welcoming everyone. No lynchings on the program. You can't shield your eyes to that, those current events.
No matter how much you dredge up ugly history, and try to make a posterboy -- today -- of a long-dead child, who likely would never have supported calls to kill officers in his memory, historical or otherwise.
