Confederate "Heritage" Month 2022, April 3: The importance of the history of lynching

I'm playing catch-up on this series of posts. I plan to use more material from Stetson Kennedy’s Southern Exposure (1946) book. But for this post, I want to link to this Greenwood (MS) column by Tim Kalich, linked here to the syndicated version in the Clarke County (MS) Tribune, Hard to Talk About Lynching 04/01/2022.

Kalich's column is about a vertran reporter, David Brown, who is researching the history of lynching in the Mississippi Delta:

His interest in Leflore County’s lynching history was sparked by a visit to the Equal Justice Initiative’s lynching memorial in Montgomery, Alabama. There some 800 steel columns break down, county by county, the more than 4,000 lynchings that occurred in 12 Southern states from 1877 to 1950. Mississippi had the most at 654, with Leflore County the most in Mississippi with 48. Carroll County is next at 29. [my emphasis]

Kalich writes about the still-persisting reluctance among many whites to recognize and understand the significance of mass racial violence against African-Americans:

More than half of Leflore County’s total, 25, are listed as unknown victims of the 1889 massacre, when the county’s white sheriff directed a murderous posse to crush an effort by Black farmers and farm workers to organize into an alliance that would make them less dependent on white merchants and others who wanted to keep them subservient.

Lynchings like this were used to punish Blacks suspected of wrongdoing or to intimidate those who dared to challenge the racial caste system that prevailed even after slavery. They are an emotionally wrenching and potentially divisive subject to tackle. Victims were shot or hanged or even burned at the stake, sometimes preceded by stomach-turning torture.

Some will claim that rehashing those gruesome cruelties threatens to reverse the racial progress that has been made in recent decades. It’s like picking at a scab and never letting it heal. [my emphasis]

In that analogy, the point of the veil of silence is exactly so the scab will never heal.