Unfinished Business

Today the Little Rock Nine are in town. So, of course, are the Rockies.

Fenway Park will be bursting at the seams. I hope the same will be true of Faneuil Hall at 5pm as we welcome Daisy Bates' courageous protégés to our town, fifty years after they took their lives in their hands by the not-so-simple act of going to school.

Through their actions, the Little Rock Nine and the countless foot soldiers of the Movement ensured that the "whites only" signs would come down, and the number of African-Americans registering to vote would go up. But now schools across the nation are re-segregating, the Supreme Court is turning its back on a history of discrimination, prisons are bursting at the seams with people of color, and the disenfranchisement of African-Americans is approaching pre Movement levels.

Fifty years after the integration of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, we need a big wake up call.

We need that wake up call because we have never fully addressed the systemic racism that has deformed this nation from the beginning and, in the words of Movement veteran Anne Braden, "contradicted and corrupted our democratic ideals."

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., for one, knew that shaking the foundations of white supremacy was not the same thing as taking those foundations apart, brick by brick, and building anew. It wasn't enough just to "dream" about an integrated, color-blind society. The social and economic structures that had been built on racism had to be completely reconstructed. Therefore, in the last years of his life, Dr. King tried to focus the nation's attention on "all its interrelated flaws – racism, poverty, militarism and materialism" and told his staff that that "radical reconstruction of society itself is the real issue to be faced."

We never have faced it – which is one reason why so many people can shrug when nooses are placed on trees in the South and on door handles in the North and say, "what's the big deal?"

The big deal hits you when you open James Allen's book Without Sanctuary. This is a book of picture postcards – postcards made by white people to send to their friends to show what a great lynching they had in their home town. In the pictures, hundreds, sometimes thousands, of smiling white residents are enjoying a diabolical form of entertainment – the butchery of a human being in order to keep other human beings of his hue "in their place." They are proud of the spectacle and proud of themselves.

These pictures were taken in the 20th century. At the beginning of the 21st century, I discovered that this form of home-grown terrorism still exercised a powerful sway when I journeyed with our youth group Project HIP-HOP to Philadelphia, Mississippi. This is the small town in Neshoba County where three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964 and where Ronald Reagan kicked off his presidential campaign in 1980.

There we met Mr. M.C. Campbell and heard his terrible story. On October 9,1990, his son, David Scott Campbell, was arrested by the local police for an unpaid driver's license fine. It was his 21st birthday.

That same night, as he sat alone in his prison cell, there was an electrical outage in the town. An hour later, when the electricity returned, the African American youth was found hanging with someone else's belt around his neck. The FBI declared in a suicide. David Scott Campbell had been dating a white girl whose father worked in the police department and had ties to the local electric company. His white girlfriend declared on national television that she suspected her father of lending a hand in his death.

David Campbell's death was one of nearly 50 suspicious "jailhouse suicides" that occurred in Mississippi jails in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

During that same trip, we visited Kokomo Mississippi, shortly after a young Black man named Raynard Johnson was found hanging from a pecan tree on his front lawn. He was just 17 years old. A popular football player, and a straight -A student, Raynard seemed to have everything to live for. He went out with several girls, both African American and white.

We learned from his family and the local press that two months before Raynard's death the phrase "Kill all niggers" was written on a bridge a quarter of a mile from his house – it was reportedly painted over by local police after Raynard's death. The family also told us that two weeks before the hanging, the uncle of the white girl that Raynard had been dating came to the house to state his disapproval of their relationship.

Did he kill himself? Local law enforcement officials said yes, stamped it a suicide, and ended their investigation. His family didn't agree and demanded a new investigation. And it was hard for us to think his death was self-inflicted when we saw the pecan tree standing in his front yard.

Raynard, we were told, was 6 feet tall. The branch he was found hanging from was at a 45-degree angle. The portion of the branch where the belt was tied was only 7 feet from the ground, and there was between 12-16 inches of belt between the branch and his neck. When his body was found, his feet were touching the ground and his knees were slightly bent. According to his family, the belt he was hanged by did not belong to him. The police disputed this.

As in Jena, Louisiana last month, thousands of people assembled in Kokomo on July 7, 2000 in an emotional procession to demand a new investigation. On February 1, 2001 the case was closed by the Justice Department which said it could find no evidence of a crime.

We don't know for sure why Raynard Johnson died. But we do know that for years, no one spoke openly of the ritualized crimes that took the lives of thousands – nearly all of them African American. During this same trip, we found that this was at last beginning to change.

We visited with a group in Georgia which had come together to commemorate the lynching on July 25, 1946 of two young African-American couples – George and Mae Murray Dorsey and Roger and Dorothy Malcom - near Monroe, a small town outside Atlanta. In 1992, a witness named Clinton Adams finally came forward and spoke about it. As a 10-year old, he had witnessed their murders while hiding in the bushes and had subsequently been cowed into silence by the KKK. His testimony encouraged local citizens and officials to form the Moore's Ford Memorial Committee.

The Committee spent six months searching for the grave sites of the victims. They renovated them and erected tombstones above them. Then they placed a state historical marker on a nearby highway. They also held a memorial service for the victims, attended by 400 people, both Black and white, and a full military funeral for George Dorsey, who was a decorated veteran.

The group has memorialized the lynching so it would be neither forgotten nor repeated. As the local newspaper said, "The best way to ease a wound is to treat it, not hope it goes away. It is time to heal."

The recent events in Jena, Louisiana remind us that this country has not thoroughly treated its wounds. It has attempted to bury the past instead of facing it – to forget it and move on. In the process it made changes which, as Dr. King told his staff in November 1966, "were not really substantive changes...the roots of racism are still very deep in America; our society is still structured on the basis of racism."

Until we face up to our history and make those "substantive changes," our national playing field will never be as level as that of Fenway Park.

Nancy Murray
Director of Education