I originally wrote and posted this two years ago.  What I felt then, I feel even more now, so I’m re-posting it. 

Just as the Ferguson Grand Jury announcement was coming out, I happened to be reading a passage in Rising Tide (an incredible and superbly written piece of American history by John M. Barry – more on that later) that was eerily familiar.  The passage takes place in Greenville, Mississippi just after the Great Flood of 1927 which left the entire Mississippi delta, including Greenville, devastated.  Blacks were being forced to carry out the bulk of the relief and rehabilitation work, for no pay.  One morning a policeman named James Mosely had been assigned to assemble a work crew, when he saw James Gooden, a well-respected black man in the community who had just returned from working all night, sitting on his front porch:

“Nigger, you’re going to work.

No, Suh.  No Suh. I just been workin’.

Nigger, don’t give no backtalk.

No Suh, I’m not backtalkin’ you.

Gooden got up from the porch, went inside his house, and closed the door.  Mosely followed him into this home and pulled his gun.  Gooden froze.

Nigger! Get your black ass in that truck.

White man.  Don’t pull no gun on me!

According to Mosely, Gooden grabbed for the gun.  Mosely shot him.  But Gooden told a different version to blacks who carried him to the hospital.  In an effort to save his life, two white doctors amputated his arm. James Gooden died anyway.

The news swept through the black community.  Seething, blacks stopped work . . . Rhodes Wasson recalled, ‘We prepared for a race riot here. . . We thought the blacks were going to uprise.  Everyone was buying guns.’

To calm the Negro community, Mosely was arrested, supposedly to be held for trial.  No one believed that would ever happen.  The county prosecutor was still Ray Toombs, the Exalted Cyclops of the local Klan. (Mosely never was indicted).”

That was almost 90 years ago.

This book, together with several other sources I have recently consumed, have taught me a lot about many things American.  But mostly they’ve taught me one essential thing about myself:  That I (baby boomer white person who considers herself to be relatively enlightened) still have a great deal to learn about the basic truths of the black experience in America, both historic and present.  As a result, I’m now in active search of my education on the subject.  Not to be too preachy, but I think every white person needs to undertake this search, because most of us simply do not know what African Americans know about this history, nor do we know what African Americans know about justice — and so we operate from a different set of truths.  Neither have most of us taken the time to cultivate any real personal insight into the racial biases we almost certainly harbor, though often unintentionally.

By the way, for inspiration, we can look to the young people in our lives.  Their hearts and minds are in most cases still wide open; seeking truth and justice unencumbered by calcified biases.  They will, I think, pull our society forward and through and eventually out of this mess.

So in the interest of sharing, I thought I might recommend a few sources that have contributed significantly to my own enlightenment on the subject, with direct implications for understanding the present tensions and debate surrounding Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, and many others.

Rising Tide.  This is the story of the efforts to tame and commercialize the Mississippi river in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, culminating in the Great Flood of 1927 (about which Randy Newman wrote the song “Louisiana”).  There’s so much in this book about America, about our politics, our identity, and our culture, and so many lessons for today.  But front and center throughout, is the African American story in the deep south.   The factual accounting of events, their description in full detail and context, has been eye-opening, even shocking to me.  As you wind your way through this text, its rich description of the nature and depth of oppression and violence against blacks, is breathtaking.  It is a story that needs to be told in American history classes and taken up in adult book clubs around the country, but to my knowledge for the most part, is not.  I thank my brother for recommending this to me.

The Case for Reparations.  This article by Ta-Nehesi Coates appeared in The Atlantic recently, and carries the African American story forward to more recent history and present day.  It describes how blacks who fled the oppression of the south in search of work and greater justice in the north, encountered a different kind of shackle that appeared in the form of rampant, intentional, government-sanctioned housing and mortgage discrimination.  Coates explains how those practices directly and significantly diminished the wealth of African American families, a legacy that lives on today — having gutted their ability to earn equity in the one asset that is the single biggest source of wealth for most Americans – our homes.  Again, here is an article that deals in details and facts that remain largely unknown (or at the very least, not fully appreciated) by many of us, but which provide critical context for the current debate.

The Central Park Five.  This is the Ken Burns documentary about the 1980’s brutal rape of a white jogger in Central Park.  I’m embarrassed to say that this story was in many ways, news to me – not the crime itself (which I remember very well) – but the truth – which I don’t remember with the same clarity and resonance.  The truth is that the young boys (four black and one of Hispanic descent) who were accused and convicted of this storied crime, were completely innocent. The truth, which came out in 2002, is that the police and prosecutor wielded the full force of their phenomenal state powers against these children (the youngest was 14 years old), to extract false confessions that were entirely constructed by the police.

Why don’t I recall the truth as clearly as I recall the crime and the alleged guilt of the accused?  Because the guilt was captured on videotape — compelling images of young black boys admitting to a brutal crime — seared into the collective memories of millions of Americans like me.  And, if I’m completely honest with myself, it’s probably also because the guilt expressed on those videotapes fit perfectly well with pre-seeded biases I may have harbored, if even just subconsciously.   Those are the ingredients for a memorable story with impact . . . a story that people believe.

The truth on the other hand – that these boys were innocent – communicated as it was in a few newspaper headlines and articles, just didn’t break through in the same way, largely because it lacked compelling images to drive home the message.  And perhaps, just perhaps, it didn’t resonate because it was a story we weren’t too interested in hearing. But thanks to the brilliant Ken Burns, we now have a full account and countervailing images that can compete with the original false ones that were occupying our brains.  We can now more fully know the truth of this deeply disturbing miscarriage of justice, and can appreciate some of what African Americans know and feel when it comes to law enforcement and expectations for justice in this country.  After all, this took place not in early 20^th century Mississippi – but in 1980s New York City.   And we know that this kind of raw, law-defying, racial injustice does not live in isolation, but is repeated in kind, throughout our country, as it has been throughout our history.

Note:  Fruitvale Station is another film that speaks to many of these same issues.  It is a dramatization of the story surrounding the shooting death of Oscar Grant by a BART police officer in Oakland, California. In the interest of wrapping up, I’ll leave this as a simple recommendation.  You can also read about it here. 

It is impossible, and irresponsible to talk about Michael Brown or Eric Garner and others, outside of this broader context.  Given historical fact and the present day, lived experience of African Americans, there can be no true finding of fact, or faith in justice served, so long as the too-familiar trappings of injustice pervade, as they do in these cases – the racial disparities between law enforcement and the communities they serve, the disrespect shown by law enforcement toward African Americans, or the failure of white prosecutors to exercise their prosecutorial function with the same vigor that they bring to other cases (after all, if they can “indict a ham sandwich” as the saying goes, why can’t they indict officers who shoot unarmed teens or whose crimes are clearly captured on videotape?).

Michael Brown, Eric Garner and others have lit a fuse I hope doesn’t go out anytime soon.  The burden is on those of us who are not African American, the ones who have generally held all the power, the ones who have not endured a history of violence and oppression and discrimination — the burden is upon us to make the extra effort to learn that history and open our minds to a deeper understanding of the African American reality in America.  The burden is on us to listen, learn and then to act to correct the many flaws in the system, so that this inexcusably long cycle of injustice is finally broken.

To continue my education and assume more of my responsibility on race, I plan to take up a long overdue read of The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander, and to exercise my voice through rallies and writing.

What’s on your syllabus?