NOLL: Walking in the silent landscapes of racism | Columns

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It was a beautiful afternoon on September 21, 2011, when I stood with my cultural geography students in a seemingly empty field in Sunset Hill Cemetery. Every semester, I take students there to discuss different burial traditions, to take a closer look at the iconography found on the tombstones, and to share a bit of local history.

Eventually we come to this area from the west, so they don’t discover the memorial on its east side. Once the last stragglers have joined the group, I ask a simple question: why is there a large empty field in the middle of our graveyard?

In the more than two decades that I have been on this excursion, only three students knew the answer.

So I ask them if they know who Mary Turner was, or Emmett Till, or Troy Davis? Most of the time they don’t, and I let the silence settle in for a bit.

Then I ask them if they know who Anne Frank was, and each hand goes up, as it should.

While one might assume that the Valdosta Daily Times readership knows who Mary Turner and Emmett Till were, many have probably never heard of Troy Davis. He is the individual who was executed on September 21, 2011 by a failing criminal justice system for the alleged murder of a Savannah police officer, even though eyewitnesses have retracted their evidence, and even though he has maintained his innocence until the last minute.

On the same day Troy Davis received a lethal injection to end his life, I stood with my students in a seemingly empty field that was once the cemetery of the unknown slaves of Valdosta. And they didn’t know.

As a native of Germany, I am not surprised by the difficulties our society has in coming to terms with our past. The country I always call home, even though I took root in the United States in 1990, must have gone through an equally painful experience.

It is always easier to deny than to face the darkest chapters of its history. To pretend we didn’t know. To think it was a long time ago. Or say such crazy words that I can’t see any color.

The latter only translates into the literal and metaphorical blindness that many of us have in the face of the reality of racism. The former are examples of how we try to tell ourselves that it has nothing to do with us. But it is.

The racism found in our society is deeply rooted in our history of enslaving millions of children of God. Slavery was even practiced by the founding fathers who wrote in our Constitution that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. .

Yet for centuries these rights only applied to white men, and in many ways this is still true.

I recently learned that Thomas Jefferson had enslaved over 600 human beings in his lifetime and that he had sex with one of them, Sally Hemmings. When this relationship started Sally was 16 and over time Jefferson fathered several children with her… who then grew up as slaves. (For more information, visit https://www.monticello.org/)

Slavery also didn’t exist not so long ago if you realize, as Clint Smith did, that the woman who opened the National Museum of African American History and Culture to alongside the Obama family in 2016 was the daughter of a slave.

So even today, there are people still alive who loved, who were brought up by, who knew, (and) who were in community with people who were born into slavery. Hence the idea that what our society and what our country looks like today would not be affected by this is both morally and intellectually fallacious (Clint Smith on NPRs Fresh Air June 1, 2021).

Likewise, it is morally and intellectually dishonest that the leaders of our communities have not yet found the courage to confront our own history of racial violence. Our townscape is dotted with names honoring former slave owners and even KKK rulers, while a Confederate monument still stands unchallenged in our courthouse plaza.

In February 2019, I wrote the column Strange Fruits, Names Forgotten to encourage our county leaders to honor victims of racial violence by creating a memorial in the northeast corner of our courthouse plaza, inspired by the work of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Ala.

County officials found such a suggestion in bad taste, however, and instead filled this corner with a memorial to fallen law enforcement officers in County Lowndes. And a work team, made up of black prisoners, prepared the ground for it.

Then, in July 2019, I wrote the column Do not see the forest for the trees to retrace the controversy of Forrest Street, while suggesting possible solutions.

However, the leaders of our city have remained silent and efforts to rename the street have seen new obstacles emerge.

Since 2019, although much has changed, and the murder of George Floyd has become a catalyst for a settling of scores in our country. Some might still prefer to sweep the truth under a rug, but we’re finally seeing some progress in telling the whole story of places like Stone Mountain Park and Jeffersons Monticello. The same must be done with our cityscape, so that our community can finally heal and come together.

If you put our Confederate monument and Forrest Street in their historical context, there is no doubt what it is.

At the beginning of the history of our city, the names given to the streets were either inspired by natural elements or by important figures. So, we see a Magnolia Street, Cyprus Street, and Forest Street on maps and in city directories, just as names like Ashley, Patterson, and Lee appear.

In 1911, nearly half a century after the Civil War and in the middle of the Jim Crow era, the United Daughters of the Confederacy erected a Confederate monument in the plaza of our courthouse. It wasn’t really about commemorating lost lives but perpetuating the lost cause myth and reaffirming white supremacy and the values ​​that came with it.

In 1915, inspired by Thomas Dixons’ novel The Clansmen, DW Griffith produced the film The Birth of a Nation which portrayed emancipated slaves as pagans, which glorified the Ku Klux Klan, and which even justified its actions.

In the wake of the Griffiths blockbuster, the KKK, which was founded by former Confederate soldiers in 1865 and whose first great wizard was Nathan Bedford Forrest, has seen a revival.

In 1918 Georgia experienced one of its worst episodes of racial violence in what is known as the Georgia Lynching rampage. It was also the year Mary Turner, her unborn child, and her husband were killed.

In 1921, the Tulsa Race Massacre in Oklahoma took place.

There is also evidence of KKK gatherings in Valdosta in the 1920s. In the Georgia Archives at the University of Georgia, you can find an image from 1922 that shows one of their outdoor ceremonies in front of a cross in fire. Behind the crowd is an advertisement for the Briggs clothing store which supplied their outfits. This clothing store belonged to MA Briggs, mayor of Valdostas from 1904 to 1906.

In 1923, just two hours south of Valdosta, the Rosewood Massacre in Florida took place. And at some point in the late 1920s, Forest Street’s name changed to Forrest Street.

Although the Depression and World War II saw the activities of the KKK calm down, its membership increased again in response to the civil rights movement in the 1950s.

Then, in 1956, Atlanta lawmakers decided to change our state flag in defiance of the Brown v Board of Education decision by substituting the Confederate battle flag for the red and white bars that had been on it since the 1860s.

It is simply unacceptable that we still have names in our cityscape honoring former members and leaders of an organization that Congress already considered for what it is, a national terrorist organization, when it passed the law. on the Ku Klux Klan of 1871.

How can we even swear allegiance to our flag when our nation does not truly ensure freedom and justice for all?

We are not defined by the actions of our ancestors, but by the lessons we learn from our past and our ability to face the truth.

I believe with all my heart that when the day comes and we finally take our pledge of allegiance seriously, we may be able to find the true meaning of an Independence Day as we free ourselves from the burdens of a dark past so that we can envision a better future.

Michael G. Noll is part of the Valdosta Coalition for Peace and Justice.

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