Commissioner Diana Hales looks at history, reconciliation

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Editor’s note: These remarks were delivered as part of the Community Remembrance Coalition-Chatham’s libations and remembrance ceremony Saturday morning at New Hope Baptist Church.

The death by mob lynching of Eugene Daniel in 1921 was regrettable and also routine in an America that was still roiling from the emancipation and migration of former slaves. The very idea that all humans shared the same intelligence and soul laid the foundation for the horror perpetuated by white Americans. Hundreds of years of social and religious conditioning led white Americans, whether slave owner or not, to believe they needed to “fix” Black and indigenous people. It was, and still is, our national hubris and disgrace.

Even when individuals showed genius, creativity, and high level of skills, the color of their skin excluded them from legal equality under the law throughout the United States The passage of the 14th amendment in 1868 gave Black men over 21 years of age the right to vote and full citizenship privileges that states could not abridge. But many of the former Confederate states found ways to keep white control through their social norms that included repression of all women and Black men. The question of race was bound up in “white survival” thinking, even then. In the 1988 publication of “Within the Plantation Household,” author Elizabeth Fox-Genovese states that the domestic subordination of white women was necessary to “survival and progress of the white race.” And those females became the arbiter of household justice toward their Negro slaves … who probably disappointed the woman’s expectations … and could be removed or sold with permission of the master. The hierarchy was clear. No matter the church teaching on the Gospels, white men and women held firm to their belief that they were doing God’s work by keeping human slaves and “fixing” them for serving white society.

As the migration of emancipated Black people from the Confederacy to the North continued, it was accompanied by the terrorism of individual lynching and murders, and includes 25 race massacres. Although it was not taught in North Carolina’s classrooms, we know that the only coup d’etat in America was in Wilmington in 1898 as a white mob murdered its way through the town’s elected government and Black community. Those race massacres were possible because of social norms about white race superiority. Across the South, the Midwest, and North from 1866 to 1985 Black people were under mob attack for the right to vote, sharecropping, governing, business success, and any white woman pointing a finger at a Black man. From the destruction of Tulsa’s Black business community in 1921, to the 1943 massacre in Detroit where Blacks were excluded from housing and jobs, and to the 1985 Philadelphia police bombing of a group in row housing because some were involved with a Black organization, the white mob delivered normal — and sanctioned — violence.

This violence is not just reflected in lynching and race massacres, but in our national propensity to individualize all minority groups and assume that white households are always more efficient. We don’t stop to consider how white American legislative and social power has framed the laws for 200 years to actively discredit black intelligence and education, impede economic mobility, and stifle the creation of family wealth. Even today, Black unemployment is twice the rate of white unemployment. No jobs? Or is it white social conditioning that wants to label Black people as deficient?

And we are not finished with mob violence. Witness the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol. Again a white mob who, waving the flags of the United States and the defeated Confederacy, claimed they were the patriots saving America. The election was surely stolen by Black people illegally voting Democratic. It had nothing to do with the mob’s manifest desire to hold on to American white supremacy and historic privilege in our changing demographic landscape.

Eugene Daniel was a farmer’s teenage son in a Black family. And that caused his death.

We have many injustices to right, and the work stretches out before us as we grapple with our own inner dialogs and conditioning passed down through generations. We can do better, and we must, in order to honor the terrified Black people who shouldn’t have died by a white mob.

Let reconciliation begin now in Chatham County.

Diana Hales is a member of the Chatham County Board of Commissioners.