by Johnisha Levi, Development Manager
“For the hanged and beaten. For the shot, drowned, and burned. For the tortured, tormented and terrorized. For those abandoned by the rule of law.
We will remember.
With hope because hopelessness is the enemy of justice. With courage because peace requires bravery. With persistence because justice is a constant struggle. With faith because we shall overcome.”
- The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, Montgomery, Alabama
America is suffering from more than just death at the hands of the coronavirus pandemic. I am talking about the perpetual killing of black men and women by state sanctioned violence. The names receiving the most publicity in our current new cycle are George Floyd (46); Breonna Taylor (25), and Ahmaud Aubrey (25), and their callous and senseless deaths are sparking a revolution that our politicians are finally having to heed. Sadly, these names only scratch the surface of recent police shootings of black men and women. A database of police killings compiled by the Washington Post from news reporting reveals the pervasiveness of this violence. Since May 1st of this year, we have also lost:
Rayshard Brooks (27); Michael “Blue” Thomas (62); Lewis Ruffin (38); Kamal Flowers (24); Tyquarn Graves (33); David McAtee (53); Derrick Thompson (46); Jarvis Sullivan (44); Momodou Lamon Sisay (39); Rubin Smith (35); Modesto Reyes (35); Tony McDade 38);Dion Johnson (28); Maurice Gordon (28); Willie Lee Quarles (60); Tobby Wiggins (45): Randy Lewis (38); Robert Johnson (29); Rayshard Scales (30); David Atkinson (24); Yassin Mohamed (47); Finan Berhe (30); Adrian Medearis (48); McHale Rose (19); Dreasjon “Sean” Reed (21); Jah’Sean Hodge (21); Quavon Webb (23); Demontre Bruner (21); Said Joquin (26); Brent Martin (32); Shaun Fuhr (24); William Debose (21)
To read this list alone, to contemplate the years lost, the families broken, let alone to watch any recorded videos, is to be shattered for humanity. And as James Baldwin wrote, “A stranger to this planet might find the fact there are any Black people at all still alive in America something to write home about.”
But to know the history of this country is to also know that this is not a new problem, but an old one, rooted in the blood-soaked soil of a land that championed slavery over freedom, and created wealth by controlling bodies and souls like chattel since before its founding. American capitalism is founded on racialized violence. For those Americans who are now waking up to the fact that “the past is never dead, it's not even the past,” they are now seeing that technological innovations and global connectivity haven’t obliterated the savagery our society inflicts on black bodies. If anything, it has only made it more visible and brought it into more homes.
Jars of soil from lynching sites across the country collected in remembrance of the victims.
I see the continuous line between my father and me despite the fact that more than a generation separates us. My father was born in 1924, so had he lived he would now be 96 years old. His was a segregated existence well into his adulthood. He served in a segregated navy as a rare black radio man in the South Pacific in World War II and would not witness school desegregation until he was 30. In my dad’s era, the slogan instead of #blacklivesmatter was “A Man was Lynched Yesterday,” in the form of a banner that the NAACP would fly from its headquarters in New York in protest. While today, we know the names of the officers who shoot black men and women, in my father’s time, this violence was perpetrated “at the hands of persons unknown.” This despite the fact that there were often photographs and postcards of vigilante murderers, some of whom were known and protected by sheriffs and police and some of whom were “lawmen” themselves.
Between 1877 and 1950, nearly 6,500 people were lynched in the United States, and the overwhelming majority of them were black men and women. My dad grew up with such a lynching in a neighboring county in Maryland. Way before #SayTheirNames became a widely used hashtag on social media, the victim’s name was George Armwood. This was 1933. Despite protesting his innocence (Armwood was accused of raping an older white woman), Armwood, a 23-year-old black man, was fed to a mob of 2,000 people that mutilated his body, hanged it from a telephone pole and then burned it. The leaders of the mob were never punished, just as many of the police today are protected by qualified immunity. It was not until 2019 that Armwood’s story was officially memorialized by the state of Maryland.
My dad was nine years old at the time of this savage carnival (A headline from the time called it a “Roman Holiday.”) I asked him about the lynching when I was finishing law school in 2004, having just completed the Capital Defender Clinic at The Equal Justice Initiative. I was working on a research project, writing about parallels between the anti-lynching crusade and the death penalty abolition movement. I came across George Armwood’s name in a book recording the victims of every year of lynching, at the so-called hands of persons unknown. I noticed George Armwood’s life was taken during my father’s lifetime in a neighboring county. I called my dad and asked him if he remembered a lynching in 1933. I did not say Armwood’s name. My dad was starting to suffer dementia; he was only nine years old at the time of George Armwood’s murder. I didn’t know what he would say. What he did say was startling in it’s clarity. “Yes, I remember. It was George Armwood. I remember the older folks talking. I remember they were scared.” From the distance of seven decades, George Armwood was seared into his soul.
Today, you can pay your respects to the victims of past violence at the Equal Justice’s Initiative Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama. It is a sacred space, designed to make you keep raising your head, in an echo of what it must have been like to encounter a lynched victim, as you walk through to read the iron tablets of lynchings in America. The iron tablets oxidize when it rains to mimic the blood spilled on our soil. And there is also a separate collection of soil from each place that each victim was slaughtered. But these aren’t just artifacts. This past is still haunting us. It is still with us every day as a reminder that George, and Breonna, and Ahmaud and countless others are deemed dispensable and that their murderers—and even more importantly our society—refuse to take responsibility for the institutional racism that enables their slaughter. Until American institutions demand accountability and recognize and prioritize the value of black life over black death, nothing will ever change. Until those in power are willing to relinquish it to preserve the lives of black men and women, we will continue to have to #SayTheirNames. Americans today are rising up to say that it is time. It is time to change.
