February celebrates Black History Month
History is the study of the past, but who decides through which lens the stories are told? This Black History Month, we reflect on our nation’s long history of racial violence and the oppression of black people that still exists today. Hundreds of years after the arrival of enslaved Africans, a presumption of danger and criminality still follows black people, who continue to die at the hands of police and vigilantes. As poet Maya Angelou wrote: “History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.”
The Equal Justice Initiative (eji.org), a nonprofit formed to address our nation’s racist legacy, states from 1877 to 1950, more than 4,400 black men, women and children were lynched by white mobs. The National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Ala., was opened in 2018 and dedicated to the victims of lynching. Founder Bryan Stevenson says slavery was founded on a lie that black people were not fully evolved, were less human, less worthy than white people. “This notion of white supremacy is what fueled a century of racial violence against black people, thousands of lynchings, mass killings, and a presumption of dangerousness and guilt that persists to this day,” Stevenson said.
In 1900, the only black member of Congress, Rep. George Henry White, introduced the first legislation to make lynching a federal crime. More than 100 years later after failing to enact anti-lynching legislation more than 200 times, Congress introduced the Emmett Till Anti-lynching Act in 2020 hoping to right this historic wrong and make lynching a federal hate crime. It failed by one vote.
DeNeen L. Brown’s National Geographic article June 5, 2020 (link below) reflects on the brutal American legacy of torture and lynching. Lynchings, often advertised in newspapers, drew large celebratory crowds of families and were meant to dehumanize, terrorize and control black people to promote white supremacist ideology.
Hunting down black people like animals, slave catchers and mobs were self-appointed juries and judges that delivered a death sentence without due process, criminal charge or opportunity for defense. In 1955, Emmett Till, 14, was kidnapped by vigilantes, tortured and mutilated for the “alleged crime” of whistling at a white woman. In 2020, modern day vigilantes chased down and killed Ahmaud Arbery, 25, for the “crime” of jogging.
In the 1800s, Jim Crow laws and Black Codes were developed by white lawmakers to assure white supremacy. The effect of laws designed to control the movement of black people is still evident in the recent deaths of Elijah McClain, 23; Michael Brown, 18; Trayvon Martin, 17: all unarmed, killed for simply walking.
Tamir Rice, 12, playing in the park with a toy gun. Luke Stewart, 23, sleeping in his car. Breonna Taylor, 26, awakened by a forced home entry. Jerome Reid, 36, holding a pill bottle. All unarmed, all killed by police.
Murders witnessed in public view — George Floyd, passed a counterfeit $20 bill; Eric Garner, sold untaxed cigarettes. Both choked to death while handcuffed.
The fear of blackness led a woman to call the police on Christian Cooper, a Harvard-educated board member of the NYC Audubon Society, while he observed birds. In St. Louis, a woman blocked her black neighbor from entering his apartment building, demanding proof he lived there.
“It doesn’t make a difference what you do, whether you are bird-watching, selling water on the sidewalk or reporting the news, your very presence signifies a threat because of the meanings associated with blackness — dangerous, impurity, inhumanity, criminal,” said Arica Coleman, an historian, cultural critic and author. “Breathing while black” is the crime, Coleman said.
White supremacy does not see black people as free and equal.
As a society, as human beings, it is time to say all lives do matter.
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The Boundary County Human Rights Task Force is founded upon the self-evident truth that all people are created equal and the principles of the dignity and worth of each human being.
To read more: Equal Justice Initiative, www.eji.org and