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Ron Jackson's Perspective
The Sunday Journal
Kankakee, Illinois
October 19, 2008
Have things really
changed? |
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Every so often I
will stumble upon something interesting on the Internet. So it was
with the Web site
www.withoutsanctuary.org.
Please be warned, the site is not for the easily disturbed.
The site has historically significant pictures that are real and are
really graphic. The pictures have been published in a book titled “Without Sanctuary” by Twin Palm Publishers.
The site is a collection of postcards of
lynchings, postcards that were commonly bought and mailed just as we would buy and send a
postcard from an exotic vacation. Naturally, most of the victims
were black, with the exception of a couple of whites, and the
perpetrators and witnesses were white, including women and children.
The dates on the cards are from the late 1800s to almost
mid-1900s and took place in places like Minnesota, Indiana, Oklahoma,
Nebraska, Missouri, and of course, Alabama and Mississippi. Oh, and southern Illinois. The real names
of the victims and their ages if known were listed. The pictures
are vivid in detail. Scars from beatings, shootings, and burnings
prior to lynching are visible.
Sadly, as I looked at the almost 100 pictures and listened to
the narrator, I wasn't sad. I couldn't feel empathy. I didn't get
angry. That didn't mean I was uncaring. It's a part of our ugly
not-so-long-ago history and I am so thankful I was not privy to the
experience. Yes, I would support any living relative of any of the
parties in the postcards to talk about reparations. Some of the
lynchings occurred as late as the 1930s.
After sharing this with a friend, she asked if this troubled
me. Before replying, I studied the entire collection again and then
perused the next morning's two major Chicago dailies.
It dawned on me that things have not really changed that much.
We still have innocent blacks dying on a daily basis.
However, there is an eerie similarity but different twist to the
postcards. We still have black lynchings.
Guns and drugs have replaced the ropes, black children have replaced
the black adult victims, and black perpetrators have replaced the white ones.
Newspapers and the Internet have replaced the postcards, and all of us who buy
the papers and search the Web have replaced the witnesses.
Subsequent conversations have yielded such remarks as, "Man,
if I was back there I would have taken somebody out before they got me.” And, “There is
no way I would have stood by and let anybody hang me or my peoples."
Yeah, yeah, yeah. After almost a century later, that is just
what we are doing now. Standing by doing nothing but gawking and
talking while people are needlessly dying. Especially children.
That troubles me.
So does the ridiculous argument that maybe the government is
behind all the Chicago Public School
student deaths this past year. There was a time when our government
was complicit in many of the crimes against its own citizens,
especially blacks. But now, blacks hold many government positions
of authority. What is it going to take before the government is no
longer credited or blamed for the social and civil ills in the black
community? A black president? If Obama should win, then what?
Then whom do we blame for today’s lynchings?
I heard the claim 20 years ago that the CIA dumped tons of
drugs in South Central Los Angeles. I guess now the feds are
dumping guns in Chicago. It's
always somebody else that we have no pictures of.
That kind of stupidity and scapegoating makes me sad, too.
Someday in the not-too-distant future someone will discover a
collection of newspapers with pictures detailing the senseless
crimes of our day. Will they be just as awed by the reports of
children having been killed for a pair of gym shoes or the color of
their clothing?
And will it make them sad? |
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