This is not a lynch mob.
Rufus Holsinger/Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library: Bankhead Highway Association, 1917. [Click on the photo to see a larger version.]
That might seem like a strange thing to say about this photo. But perhaps not, depending on your knowledge of history or the color of your skin. There's no question that a black man or woman who came across a scene like this, in 1917 -- it's somewhere just outside Charlottesville, Virginia -- would proceed with a great deal of caution. White people were dangerous -- especially white men, and most especially white men in packs. Lynchings were common throughout the South, essential parts of the violence and intimidation on which white supremacy was built. Although the 84 lynchings that took place in Virginia, between 1887 and 1950, paled in comparison to Mississippi's 654, every African American knew that danger was always in the air. There would have been no telling what this group of white men was up to.
The fact that the men looked prosperous wouldn't have been reassuring. As Robert L. Zangrando notes, lynchings were not...
...necessarily the handiwork of a local rabble; not infrequently, the mob was encouraged or led by people prominent in the area's political and business circles. Lynching had become a ritual of interracial social control....
Our imaginary African American travelers might have breathed a sigh of relief when they caught a glimpse of the black man sitting in the driver's seat of the wagon. And, as it turns out, the men in the photo were not murderers. They were members of the local Bankhead Highway Association, whose goal was to convince the promoters of the privately-funded road to bring part of it through Charlottesville.
Yet there is a connection between these men and a lynch mob. They were city fathers, men who created, maintained, and benefited from the system of white supremacy that lynchings and the threat of lynchings protected. They and their like created segregated public schools, sending black children to underfunded, second-class institutions. They refused to employ black men and women in anything other than the most menial positions. They made sure that the majority of black people could find housing only in the least desirable, most unsanitary parts of town. And they had virtually stripped black citizens of their constitutional rights, including, for men, the right to vote.
These men of property and standing, that is, shaped Charlottesville, and we live with their legacies of segregation and inequality. Perhaps the most lasting damage that they caused was a steep drop in the proportion of the city's citizens who are African American -- from over 50% at the end of the Civil War to just under 20% today. Over the years, black people left by the thousands, seeking freedom and opportunities that they couldn't find at home.
No, this isn't a lynch mob. But it's fair to call it a gathering of white supremacists. And it's likely that some of the men in the photo joined the Ku Klux Klan, four years later, at a midnight ceremony at Thomas Jefferson's grave.
John Edwin Mason: Ku Klux Klan Robe, circa 1925. Albemarle Charlottesville Historical Society.
The Klan has been on my mind, lately. Partly, because it plans to hold a rally in Charlottesville tomorrow, July 8th. And, even more, because I attended a press conference at the Albemarle Charlottesville Historical Society, yesterday, at which it briefly displayed some of the Klan robes in its collection locally for the first time. (They remain available for viewing by appointment.) The photo above shows one of them.
The robes probably date from the 1920s, when the Klan played a prominent role in the life of the city. Here's how the local newspaper, the Daily Progress, reported the founding of the local branch, in a front page article, on June 28th, 1921.
The spirit of Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest hovered over Charlottesville recently, and the fiery cross, symbolic of the Invisible Empire... cast an eerie sheen upon a legion of white robed Virginians as they stood upon hallowed ground and renewed the faith of their fathers.
Which is by way of saying that the Ku Klux Klan has been organized in this city. Hundreds of Charlottesville’s leading business and professional men met around the tomb of Jefferson at the midnight hour one night last week and sealed the pledge of chivalry and patriotism with the deepest crimson of red American blood.
I learned about the Klan and about Charlottesville's racial history last year, doing research in connection with my service on the city's Blue Ribbon Commission on Race, Memorials, and Public Spaces. It's one thing, however, to encounter the Klan in old books and newspapers. It's another thing entirely to confront physical objects that were worn by particular Klan members in this particular city, which is my home. The robes undoubtedly still contain traces of their owners -- sweat, body oil, tiny hairs, fragments of skin.... Some of this surely remains embedded in the cloth. There's the evidence, too, of the care that someone took in cutting, sewing, and fitting the robes. Inevitably, also, the robes mimic the shape of a man.
The robes have a dark presence -- both physical and psychological -- that books and newspapers and pixels on a computer screen do not and cannot. I wasn't the only person who sensed, yesterday, that we were in the presence of evil -- a banal, Chamber-of-Commerce, thoroughly American evil -- but evil nonetheless.
Kelly J. Baker's article, "The Artifacts of White Supremacy," had been helpful, over the last day, in helping me think through the impact that the robes had on me. The "Klan’s America became real through the use of objects," she writes.
Robes, fiery crosses, and even the American flag were all material objects employed by the 1920s Klan to convey their “gospel” of white supremacy. The Klan’s religious nationalism, its vision of a white Protestant America, became tangible in each of these artifacts, and each artifact reflected the order’s religious and racial intolerance.
...Despite its importance, the average Klansman’s uniform was simple: a belted white robe with cross patch, hood, and mask. The robe was long and shapeless, and its shapelessness was important, covering bodies from neck to wrist and from wrist to feet. Only the wearer’s hands, calves, and feet appear visible. A deep red patch on the chest interrupts its whiteness. Inside the patch resides a cross with a teardrop shape in its center. The cross symbolized the order’s commitment to Christianity while the teardrop symbolized the blood Jesus shed to redeem humanity. The color of the robes displayed the requirements for membership: white, Protestant, and “native-born” American, all rendered as white.
...By wearing white robes under the light of the fiery cross, the 1920s Klan hoped to save America. Robes, crosses, and the American flag materialized their hope. The fiery cross and robes were also artifacts of fear and terror to the Klan’s victims.
Faulkner famously wrote that "The past is never dead. It's not even past." The human tragedy contained in that phrase is powerfully apparent in Charlottesville this week. But there's also a challenge in those words, one that we can chose to accept or to ignore. How we respond to history is up to us.
* * *
You can learn much more about history of lynching on the Equal Justice Initiative's interactive website, Lynching in America.
*
Comments