Never forget our only sin: To be born in black skin

Never forget: They flayed us. Mutilated us. Cut off our genitals. Set us ablaze. Posed for photographs brazenly, sometimes giddily, in front of burnt Black bodies then mailed them as picture postcards.

Lynching was American sport. A weapon of mass subjugation. Bloodthirsty white lynch mobs terrorized Blacks, administered cruel and visceral hate with virtually no repercussions.

The devil is in the details: They skinned us alive. Picked off our charred remains — fingers, toes, ears — taking them as souvenirs like pieces of bone sold, according to one account, for 10 to 25 cents.

Good “Christian” folk, lawyers, judges, sheriffs, business owners and fellow countrymen and women, they partook of, or reveled in, the sight of a noose being pulled tightly around a Black body, watching it jerk.

They lynched children, whole families, little girls, pregnant women, their bodies dangling from trees or bridges. Some smoldered into the sunrise as the scent of charred flesh drifted over the morning dew. Or a swarm of vultures was found devouring a hanging black corpse.

Our only sin: To be born in black skin.

It is pure American hate in a land of so-called “freedom” and “democracy.” Moreover, it is American hypocrisy in a land where a legacy of lynching and racial terror is rooted in its soil.

That history lies at the core of a renewed nationwide call for a racial reckoning and equal justice and protection amid the George Floyd killing, which has sparked widespread protests and which many see as a modern-day lynching.

There are indeed parallels, according to the Equal Justice Initiative, which this week released a new report that more than 2,000 people were lynched during Reconstruction, from 1865 to 1877, a 12-year period following the Civil War.

“…It was during Reconstruction that a century-long era of racial hierarchy, lynching, white supremacy, and bigotry was established — an era from which this nation has yet to recover,” the report concludes.

Indeed the rate of documented racial terror lynchings during that period was nearly three times greater than the rate of killing in the decades following Reconstruction, according to the report. An earlier report in 2015 detailed more than 4,400 racial terror lynchings from 1877 to 1950, a 74-year span.

“Thousands more were assaulted, raped, or injured in racial terror attacks between 1865 and 1877,” the latest report reads.

Bryan Stevenson, director of the legal advocacy group based in Montgomery, Alabama, writes in the introduction that the report aims “to provide context and analysis of what happened during this tragic period of American history and to describe its implications for the issues we face today.

“We believe our nation has failed to adequately address or acknowledge our history of racial injustice and that we must commit to a new era of truth-telling followed by meaningful efforts to repair and remedy the continuing legacy of racial oppression.”

The report, which documents 34 mass lynchings across the country, also concluded that thousands of additional victims that were undocumented may be forever lost to history.

But America must never be allowed to forget — lynchings recorded and those not, whether back then or today.

Never forget the lynching of Mary Turner, about 20, 8 months pregnant and mother of two. By a river, between Lowndes and Brooks Counties in Georgia, on May 19, 1918, Turner was hung upside down by the ankles, doused with gasoline and set on fire, her belly gutted open. Her baby fell to the earth and cried. A member of the lynch mob promptly stomped the infant into the ground.

Never forget the Tulsa massacre, the four little girls in the 16^th Street Baptist Church bombing…

Trayvon Martin. Ahmaud Arbery. George Floyd…

Never forget.

Email: Author@johnwfountain.com

Send letters to letters@suntimes.com.