As I was reading this story, several things crossed my mind. While I don't live in Cummings, Georgia, the refrain from this narrative is universal as it applies to the lives of Black Americans.
A woman is assaulted (a white woman) and then later dies of her injuries and the only three Black people in that area of Forsyth County at that time were accused of the crime. Based on a confession that is alleged to have been coerced, the 24 year old was arrested and jailed. Soon thereafter an angry white mob dragged him from his jail cell where he was riddled with bullets and beaten with a crowbar. I'm not sure how he was still alive after all of that but he was then "hitched onto the back of a wagon with a
noose around his neck and eventually hanged in the Cumming town square" where people took turns throwing stones at him and shooting more bullets into his dead body while the mob cheered. The other two Black residents who were teenagers were later lynched after one-day expediated trials that precipitated the onslaught of racial violence and terror aimed at the county's Black residents, including the Ku Klux Klan Night Riders visiting terror upon them until they had driver every single Black person not just from Cummings, but all of Forsyth County. Forsyth remained all white for the next 75 years.
Emmitt Til, a 14 year old, who was kidnapped, and murdered by lynching for allegedly whistling at a white woman was one of the historical events that came to mind while I read this. The article also brought to mind the Tulsa race riot in the which the most affluent Black community in the country was torched, and bombed out of existence. On that case like this one, none of the Black business owners or residents were compensated for thier losses, with the insurance companies denying each and every single claims. The mob also robbed the Black banks and whoever the guarantors were at that time, refused to honor any of these claims as well.
While of all this is beyond horrendous, the insult to the injury however is that out of a mob of 3,000 people in Tulsa, and however many were participants in the Forsyth lynchings, not a single white person was ever arrested, let alone charged or made accountable for the crimes they committed and the harm they had inflicted. In the case of Emmitt Til he was murdered because a white woman sent someone after him, they admitted they did it, that she initiated it yet none of them have been held accountable.
If a person or entity has done something that has caused harm, no healing can occur if the entity or person keeps insisting that nothing occurred. That's where confronting the past comes in.
Is this possible? To confront the past so that we all can move on to a better future?
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Lisa558
jwoodie
Concerned American
Indeependent
Lastamender
mudwhistle
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