NAACP - The Struggle Continues

The Negro Holocaust - Lynching and Race in America - Part 3:

By Lunette Howell and Betty Valentine, NAACP Editorial Team

The Truth Contributors

In April of this year, the Equal Justice Initiative opened the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama.  The memorial is constructed of hundreds of floating columns on which the names of lynching victims from over 800 counties across the U.S. are inscribed. 

The museum examines the connections between past and present and the lingering legacy of racial injustice. The memorial remembers the victims of a sustained domestic campaign of terror and the thousands of African-Americans who were lynched to maintain white supremacy.

Script on one of the walls reads: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration. This statement makes a direct connection to the past, and in particular, the lasting effects of lynching.  During the period of lynching, blacks were psychologically scarred and forced to learn survival tactics that allowed them to rebel against inaction. 

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice is located a few blocks from the museum.  It is dedicated to the more than 4,000 documented lynching victims.  The six-acre site contains 801 six-foot monuments constructed of corten steel to symbolize their brutal deaths.  The names of the victims are carved into the steel columns that dangle from beams, much like the lynched bodies dangled from trees.

More than 800 jars of soil from lynching sites across the country are exhibited in the museum that traces the history of enslaved black people in America from the horrors of slavery to the terrors of lynching, the humiliation of Jim Crow and the current crisis of police violence against blacks.

Blacks understood the consequences of being powerless and sought to defy their fate. The civil rights movement brought a rise of militant groups designed to physically and emotionally reclaim their manhood.  These new tactics are now manifested in all forms of violence and they are no longer aimed at just the white oppressor. The spray has now widened to include anyone threatening the black man’s sense of masculinity. This violence has resulted in one in three black men between the ages of 20 and 29 being incarcerated.  Many have lost their right to vote.

There is a process in place often referred to as the Inferiorization Process that is described as the systematic attack involving the entire complex of political, legal, educational, economic, religious, military, and mass media institutions controlled by whites; designed to produce dysfunctional patterns of behavior among blacks in all areas of life.  Through this process blacks are socialized to be incapable of solving or helping to produce solutions to problems posed by the environment.  For whites, however, the process is designed to facilitate their development as functional superiors.

As a direct effect of their disenfranchisement, black men are then subjected to joblessness and the inability to contribute to their households. Many can no longer vote due to felony convictions so they remain unable to effect social change.  While they are no longer physically lynched, they are psychologically separated from their manhood and expected to cope in society’s vacuum.

It will take the courage of ALL Americans to step up and support the fight for equality and justice.  The efforts and struggles of our ancestors cannot be forgotten.  Our families cannot be attacked.  We must VOTE to get the right people in office!  We must speak up!  We must educate ourselves about the issues and people running for office in order to eliminate racial discrimination and social and economic disparities.

Become a NAACP member - $30/adult; $15/youth annually and receive a Crisis magazine.  Join our meetings every 2nd Tuesday at 7:00 p.m. The August meeting will be at the Mott Branch Library at 1085 Dorr Street.

SAVE THE DATE – NAACP Freedom Fund Banquet, Saturday, October 27, 2018, at the Stranahan Great Hall.  Call for details at 419-214-1551.  View our website at www.naacptoledo.org.

Copyright © 2018 by [The Sojourner's Truth]. All rights reserved.
Revised: 08/16/18 14:12:11 -0700.

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