What we enjoy about the weekly 100-mile round trip to the Grant County Herald in Elbow Lake each week is the chance to listen to the radio. Sometimes we just lose ourselves in the music, but other times we listen to the Fresh Air program on National Public Radio and find ourselves entranced by the guest. Such was the case last week.
We heard host Terry Gross interview human rights lawyer Byron Stevenson. It was a fascinating and troubling conversation. He is a law professor at New York University and the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative. It records slavery and racism in America, but his conversation on NPR was about so much more.
He seeks to ensure that evidence of America’s past, with its painful progress toward Constitutional rights and freedoms for all, is preserved. In his conversation with Gross, he describes the systematic brutality of life in the South for Blacks following the Civil War’s end and their emancipation.
It started a new era of “Jim Crow” laws that brutally restricted their rights. Laws such as allowing only those whose grandfathers had voted to vote, poll taxes that Blacks couldn’t afford, minor crimes that banned them from voting while whites who had committed the same crimes could vote, or rules that only Blacks had to identify how many jelly beans were in a jar to qualify to vote.
Stevenson describes the trauma Blacks riding the Montgomery, Alabama, buses suffered. It was a system that they needed to get to work, but one that could lead to their death. “In 1950, a Black World War II veteran Hilliard Brooks was shot and killed by police after he argued with the driver as he attempted to board a bus,” he says.
Blacks had to sit in the back of the bus because the front was reserved for whites. Even when the front seats were empty, Blacks, including elderly women, had to stand in the crowded rear of the bus. Blacks had to pay at the front of the bus but enter the back door. Sometimes, the drivers would pull away as a Black person hurried to the back after paying.
Stevenson Equal Justice Initiative has worked to research and document the nearly 6,500 lynchings that took place in the U.S. between 1865 and 1950. That is more than 2,000 lynchings that had been known to exist before its research.
“We’ve got instances where a man was lynched because he didn’t call a police officer, ‘sir,’” he tells Gross. “Somebody didn’t step off the sidewalk when white people walked by. A Black man went to the front door of a white person’s house, not the back door. One Black woman in Kentucky was lynched because they couldn’t find her brother.” She was substituted for him.
Cruelty, terror, and instilling fear into the South’s Black population was the point. It kept them in their place. It kept them from exercising their rights. It kept them from political power even in places where they represented much of the population.
Talking about slavery, lynching and repression isn’t meant to make white Americans feel guilty about their past, but to build awareness of how it happens and its consequences. When that awareness awakens, people become more open to a just and fair society.
To get to where truth and justice, truth and reconciliation, truth and restoration, truth and repair” are possible, Stevenson says people must recognize there is a necessary order to the sequence. “You can’t get the beautiful ‘R’ words, like redemption and reconciliation and restoration and repair, unless you first tell the truth
“In South Africa, after the collapse of apartheid, they committed space for the victims of apartheid to give voice to their harm. They even created space for the perpetrators to give a voice to their regret.
“You go to Germany, the villain of the 20th century, and you can’t go 200 meters without seeing markers and monuments and memorials dedicated to the harm of the Holocaust. They’ve made truth-telling a necessity. No student in Germany can graduate without demonstrating a detailed knowledge and understanding of the Holocaust. They require it. And the result of that is that there are no Adolf Hitler statues in Berlin. There are no monuments or memorials to the Nazis,” he told Gross.
America has never taken the necessary steps to fully recognize the damage caused through repression and injustice. Blacks aren’t the only ones who have suffered.
In an article with the headline The Unfinished Revolution, Andrew Aayomo writes about Joseph Kurihara. He was an American World War I veteran. He was a loyal citizen. America was home. It didn’t matter. His American dream was shattered.
After the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, he became one of nearly 125,000 Japanese Americans sent to internment camps in the U.S. When the Pacific campaign of World War II ended on Sept. 2, 1945, he boarded a ship for Japan six weeks later, leaving behind his American home.
We are seeing the same injustices today against Hispanic immigrants. History repeats itself. Honorably discharged veterans are deported. Over time, the injustice becomes obvious, but in the moment, if uneducated about our past injustices, we fail to see what we are doing.
We learn from our history, so we don’t make the same mistakes. We learn so that we are not blind to the potential for people to treat others with cruelty and injustice. We learn from our past so that we can nurture kindness and inclusiveness rather than cruelty through a sense of superiority.
When we drive out empathy, when we justify injustice, legitimize prejudice, and the violence it was too often responsible for in our past, we encourage and condone it today.
A sense of superiority opens cruelty’s gate. Those who embrace it feel justified treating others as lesser human beings.
America’s proud moments are the times when we overcame injustice. We don’t celebrate times when superiority, prejudice and fear led to repression.
