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THE HOUSTON CHRONICLE
March 28, 2007
Written by: Patricia Bernstein
While I applaud the efforts of Texas State Sen. Rodney Ellis and State
Rep. Senfronia Thompson to pass a Resolution of formal apology for
slavery, their proposal does not go far enough. It may be a necessary
first step, but Texas and Virginia, and the other slaveholding states,
have much more to apologize for than just the institution of slavery,
hideous though it was.
Particularly during the post-Reconstruction and Jim Crow periods,
African-Americans in the South were treated with extraordinary
brutality and cruelty, from the second-class citizenship status
formalized in segregation to the epidemic of lynching that swept across
the South and up into the Midwest as far north as Duluth, Minn.,
between about 1880 and 1930. Almost 500 documented lynchings took place
in Texas alone, a greater number than in any other state except Georgia
and Mississippi.
These lynchings included some of the most atrocious of the so-called"spectacle lynchings," a species of mass entertainment that probably
began on Feb. 1, 1893, in Paris, Texas, with the prolonged
torture/murder with hot irons and a bonfire of Henry Smith, a retarded
black man, before a cheering mob of 10,000 spectators. In addition to
the violence directed at individuals, there were also periodic "race
riots," which usually meant pogroms directed at blacks. In 1886, all
blacks were completely driven out of Comanche County by vigilantes. My
father, who grew up in Comanche County in the 1920s, remembers stories
of signs posted on the edge of town that read, "Nigger, don't let the
sun set on you here."
The law enforcement system of the late 1800s and early 1900s, such as
it was, was always rigged against blacks and expended far more effort
punishing blacks who spoke out against atrocities than identifying and
prosecuting the malefactors who committed the atrocities. In 1905, for
instance, after the mob lynching of 19-year-old Sank Majors in Waco,
local authorities fined and jailed those who protested the lynchings
for "incendiary language" but made no effort to prosecute any of the
200 men who had broken down the jail doors with a sledgehammer and
seized and murdered the prisoner.
Waco has been a standout among Texas towns in recent years, with both
the City Council and county Commissioners, in response to the prodding
of a local interracial coalition, finally passing in 2006 resolutions
of regret for the city's nasty history of violence against blacks. The
Waco newspaper even published an editorial apologizing for the role
that Waco's newspapers played in inciting the lynchings of long ago. It
is very little and very late, but more than others have done. Many
Texas cities and towns have not yet even begun to confront their own
ugly racist past.
Why is it so important to remember and memorialize the evil acts of the
past when the same funds could be used to feed, house and educate
people today? Why should we apologize for deeds committed by others
long dead? Precisely because we are the only ones left to do it and
someone must. And because our white ancestors, and ultimately we,
benefited economically, socially and culturally from the mistreatment
of others. Black Texans of the time, and ultimately their descendants,
suffered and were deprived.
Public apologies are needed in order to heal the wounds left by the
past, in order to help us understand how the past creates the present,
and in order to educate each new generation about the real consequences
of bigotry unleashed. My teachers made sure I knew about the atrocity
of the Alamo but never told me about the atrocity of the lynching of
Henry Smith.
The resolution by Ellis and Thompson is timely and appropriate, but it
needs to be expanded to include the evils of the post-slavery era, as
well, so that the whole story is available to us, and no one is allowed
to look away, minimize or evade the past anymore.
Bernstein is a Houston writer and author of "The First Waco Horror: the
Lynching of Jesse Washington and the Rise of the NAACP," published by
Texas A&M University Press in 2005.
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