AGENDA The past isn’t past
Alan McIntyre
Ferguson, Missouri
In 2012, Historic Scotland decided that it would follow the lead of English Heritage and start commemorating notable Scots through a ‘Blue Plaque’ scheme to identify buildings closely associated with them. With an admirable eclecticism, the initial set of 12 honourees ranged from Dudley Watkins, the creator of ‘Oor Wullie’, to John Logie Baird, the man ultimately responsible for the scourge that is Ant and Dec.
Walk the streets of Germany and you’ll see a very different type of link to the past. In 1995 the German artist Gunter Demnig laid the first ‘stolperstein’ stones in the city of Cologne. Twenty years later, there are now 50,000 of these four-inch brass-covered cubes of concrete embedded in the streets of 18 European countries. In their day, some of the people commemorated by these stones may have been considered great men and women, but the purpose of these stones is the exact opposite of singling out the few over the many. Instead, the project seeks to be comprehensive in remembering the displacement of huge swathes of the European population by the Nazis.
Originally planned to just focus on the 1,000 gypsies deported from Cologne in the 1930s, the vast majority of the stones now identify Jews who ultimately died in the Nazi death camps. Not all who are commemorated underfoot died, but all were displaced and all were discriminated against.
These ‘stumbling blocks’ are intended as a permanent reminder to the German population of the horror of those years; a visual stimulus to always think about the lives disrupted, scarred and prematurely ended during that dark period in their history. As the brass covers catch and reflect the sunlight against a generally grey background, they’re a conduit that brings the past into the present in an unobtrusive but persistent fashion. The biographical information on each stone is scant; name, date of birth, date of deportation and date of death if known. This lack of biography gives them a stark eloquence and allows the observer standing in front of a nondescript house or office block to conjure their own backstory for the victim.
America has its own historic markers. Get off the interstate highways and the verges of the USA are festooned with reminders of the revolutionary war, the war of 1812, the opening of the west, and the various other facets of what is now nearly a 250-year history. Tour the south and two eras are especially prominent. The first is the American civil war, a tumultuous four years that resulted in 600,000 American deaths and that still shapes US politics and culture 150 years later. As William Faulkner, the great southern novelist noted: ‘The past is never dead. It isn’t even past’.
Despite the moral bankruptcy of the slave system that precipitated the war, the standard confederate history for public consumption still tends to be a romanticised ‘Gone with the Wind’ view of dashing cavaliers defending their way of life against northern aggression; of men forever memorialised in countless town squares.
The other more recent period of history commemorated throughout the south is the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s. The long march to equal rights is currently enjoying a high profile through a series of rolling 50th anniversaries, from Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat on the bus in 1955, to this year’s marking of the Bloody Sunday march in Selma. These civil rights memorials tend – not surprisingly – to have an uplifting and celebratory tone that commemorates the success of non-violent protest in forcing widespread change in American society.
However, there is also now a growing clamour to actively remember more painful aspects of southern black history. A recent report estimated that between 1877 and 1950, there were nearly 4,000 lynchings across 12 states in the American south. These extra-judicial killings of black men were often public spectacles, tolerated and in many cases sanctioned by local and state authorities. Young men were hung from trees or in some cases burned alive, and were often paraded through town and humiliated before being killed in front of large, supportive crowds. Sometimes they were prisoners taken from jail cells, with the lynching masquerading as justice for an actual crime, but often they were killed simply for breaking strict racial taboos; for touching a white woman or arguing with a white man.
The moral outrage at ISIS for burning alive a Jordanian pilot a few months ago needs to be contrasted with an incident in 1922 in a small town in Texas, a horror that also wouldn’t have been out of place in medieval England. Three black men, none of whom had been convicted of a crime, were castrated, stabbed, dragged through the streets behind a tractor and then ultimately doused in gasoline and set on fire in front of hundreds of picnicking spectators as the local sheriff looked on. While thousands of blacks were killed in these lynchings, the impunity with which local white communities could punish even minor social transgressions meant that millions more blacks learned to live in fear of this brutal campaign of intimidation.
These lynchings weren’t just ‘frontier justice’ for local criminals. One study estimates that over 20 black first world war veterans – many of whom had served their country with distinction on the western front – were lynched between 1918 and 1920, some still with their uniforms on as they died. Having experienced a different world in Europe, many of these men found that they could no longer accept harsh discrimination at the hands of their white countrymen and they paid a heavy price for asserting their rights. Having been freed from the bondage of slavery by the civil war, the lynchings of thousands of black men in the south was clearly a form of domestic terrorism, designed to perpetuate a society in which blacks were inferior to whites; economically, socially and, in the eyes of many white southerners, also morally.
You’ll find almost no markers identifying the locations of these deaths. No plaques on oak trees, no stolpersteins embedded in the back roads of Georgia and Mississippi. Where efforts have been made to memorialise these crimes, there has been resistance from local white communities via the argument that it is better to move on rather than drag up the past. But the success of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa demonstrated the necessity of confronting the past, not for reparations and retribution, but simply to recognise and bear witness to what had occurred and pave the way for a new beginning. If Germany hadn’t boldly and consistently confronted the horror of the holocaust (of which the stolpersteins project is just one small example), it wouldn’t now be at the heart of Europe politically and economically.
The mistreatment of blacks in American society isn’t just a historical issue; it’s a current and painful open wound. A rallying cry over the last year has been that ‘black lives matter’. In riots from Ferguson, Missouri to Baltimore a few weeks ago, we’ve seen the response to what the black community sees as the latest incidents in a long history of extra-judicial killings. Rather than white southern farmers carrying ropes, the killers are now seen to wear police uniforms and carry guns. Over the last decade it’s estimated that close to 90 unarmed black males have been killed by the police, either in the act of being arrested or when in custody, and in New York City a black male is five times more likely to be shot by the police than a white male.
The great early 20th-century migration of African Americans from the south to the industrial cities of the north was partly economic, but it was also in response to the terrorism of lynching. Unfortunately, the fear of overt racism in the old south has now metastasised into broader fears of economic segregation, an apparent assumption of guilt by law enforcement, and a cycle of violence and retribution that will likely see a third of all black males born in the last decade end up in jail at some point in their lives. When it comes to issues of race and criminal justice, the US has a tortured history that stokes both resentment and fear on both sides.
Throughout the long march of liberalism in the US from the civil rights movement, through gender equality, to the current sea change on gay marriage, the states of the old confederacy have been consistently on the wrong side of history. Maybe it will take 4,000 historic markers nailed to trees in the south and solpersteins in the streets of Ferguson and Baltimore to truly create an environment where the black community can feel that the record of crimes against them has been recognised and confronted by the rest of America. Maybe only after that sort of catharsis can the black community move on and deal with the many economic and social challenges that it currently faces.
By Alan McIntyre | June 2015