Two "N" Words and a "D" Word

I tried to teach my students to have empathy at every chance I had; this is my favorite lesson and one I believe had a real impact.

In light of the massacre in Pittsburgh yesterday, I thought I'd share this for what it might be worth. 

I was writing in another venue about how much I hated standardized testing, and how I thought the tests weren't even helping, when I changed to the topic of empathy, as you will see below:

            By comparison, one lesson I’m proud of, created long before teachers were ordered to standardize everything, and maybe wear matching shirts and slacks, went to the heart of human decency.

            It began with a boy on the bus. 

            “Back when I was in ninth grade,” I explained to classes, “we used to see kids we called ‘hair lips.’ I don’t mean to be cruel. They were born with a birth defect involving a hole in the palate (here I showed what I meant) or lip. Doctors closed the hole. But this left scars and most ‘hair lips’ sounded funny when they talked.

            “We had a boy like that, who had other handicaps, who rode our bus. The only person he talked to was the driver. Every morning he’d climb aboard and call out, ‘Eyyyy, Brrnee.’ Bernie. That was the driver’s name. He’d walk down the aisle and two big high school guys would go: ‘Eyyyy, Brrnee.’ They mocked him every day. It made me sick then. It makes me sick now.

            “If I had been bigger, I would have told them to stop,” I added, “but I was skinny and couldn’t do much to help.”

            Every student in the room could see the point. The cruelty of the two older boys. The evil of picking on one so defenseless. This held their attention and we went from there.

            For homework students had read a handout based on A Brief History of the Indies, published in 1552, written by Bartolome Las Casas, a Spanish priest. Las Casas admitted when he first came to the New World all he cared about was gold. He purchased Indian slaves and ignored the teachings of Christ. When he saw cruelties all around he began to feel a weight upon his soul. He freed his slaves and took holy orders, devoting his life to saving as many natives as he could. 

Students read scenes like this:

     The Christians, with their horses and swords and lances, began to slaughter and practice strange cruelty among them [the natives]...and spared neither children, nor the aged, nor pregnant women, nor those in child labor. They not only stabbed them but dismembered them [cut them up] like lambs in a slaughterhouse.

     They made bets as to who could split a man in two or cut off his head with one sword blow...They took babes from their mothers...and dashed their heads against the rocks...Others they seized by the shoulders and threw them into the rivers, laughing and joking...and saying as the babies fell into the water, “Boil there, you offspring of the devil!”

Before classes began, I prepared by taping pictures of the Holocaust on the board and pulling down maps and a movie screen to hide them. Students entered and took their seats. I told them the story of the boy on the bus and asked simply, “How can people be so cruel?”

That was our question for the day.

“What was the worst example from last night’s reading?” I inquired.

Almost every student raised a hand. “When the Spanish cut off the hands of the slaves,” Maggie responded.

“When soldiers burned the building with 300 Indian leaders inside,” said Marco.

“Throwing babies into the river,” Deedee added.

Page from Ian's book for a project on human hatred.

“How could they do it?” I asked again. “How could so many be so cruel? And what made Las Casas and others who tried to save the natives different?”

            I didn’t expect anyone to bite yet. I continued: “How long did Las Casas spend trying to save the Indians?”

Ken responded: “Fifty years.” 

I asked: “How many of you ever walk down the street and see a bug and step on it?”

All kinds of hands went up.

“Didn’t you feel guilty?” I asked one boy. “Gary! You murderer! That bug had a family, and they’re all like, ‘Hey, when’s Dad coming home, maybe he’ll bring us a toy,’ and you’re like, ‘No big deal. I’ll just scrape dad off the bottom of my shoe and keep walking.’”

The bug idea always got a laugh—the last of the day. I asked how the Spanish (some of them) could do what they did. No one was ready to answer. “It’s the same as the two boys on the bus. Or stepping on a bug. What did the soldiers say when they threw babies in the river?”

“Boil there, you offspring of the devil,” Deedee offered.

Correct. “Now, if the devil walked in this room right now and Gary jumped up and killed the devil, wouldn’t he be good?”

Deedee admitted Gary would be good. 

“You admit you’ve stepped on bugs,” I reminded her. “No one thinks killing bugs is wrong?”

They’re just bugs classmates interjected.

Unfortunately, I explained, Hitler and his followers believed killing Jews was acceptable. One Nazi official said the world would build a monument in their honor because they had the courage to do what no one else did. Getting rid of Jews was “like killing vermin,” he insisted, “a matter of cleanliness.”

            Did anyone know what vermin were?

“Bugs, fleas. Rats, I think,” Jacob offered. I told the class he was right.

   

“It’s a question of dehumanization,” I continued. The definition goes on the board: “to see others as less than human; lower than yourself.”

“I hate to tell you this,” I said, “but most of you dehumanize others. You put labels on groups or individuals you don’t like and you’re on your way!”

“We don’t kill people, though,” Greg objected. True. I turned and added to our notes: “Labeling: to see all members of a group as the same, without individual difference.”

In our school, students admitted peers were labeled “preps,” as in preppy, well-dressed, college-prep types. Poor kids (at least when I started) were labeled “grits,” dirty, lowly, unclean. Labels, we noted, allowed us to ignore the fact our enemies are human. 

I threw this out: “Next time you see someone you don’t like, say: ‘I hate that human being.’ It doesn’t work.”

I said I despised labels. But who could think of one? Every year I worried some parent would see this day’s notes and flip. The examples poured out: nigger, fag, gook, bitch, jock, nerd.

“Yeah,” I interjected, “let’s pick on him. He’s a nerd!” I asked someone to tell me what made a nerd a nerd.

Oliver and Kayla both said nerds were weak. That’s two “N-words” now.

“Oh! Even better! Let’s pick on the weak!” I added scornfully. We were back to the boy on the bus. Students who knew they were guilty of such behavior were already shifting in their seats.

            Then we moved to the final steps of the lesson. We raised the maps and movie screen. The kids came forward and looked at pictures of the Holocaust. There were young children being rounded up, Stars of David upon their sleeves. There was a grandmotherly-type looking straight into the camera. “Look: she seems like the type who’d bake cookies for the grandkids.

            “Dangerous,” I scoffed.

Another picture showed a house painted with the word: “Jude.” “Notice,” I told my class, “you can walk down the street and say, ‘I hate those Jews!’ You don’t even have to see them to hate them.”

“We do the same,” Antoinette replied. “We label people according to skin color and don’t think.” 

I nodded agreement.

Not the same picture used in class; but same idea.

Antoinette was staring at a photo of a long trench filled with emaciated corpses. Tears started. Her friend tugged her arm and led her to her seat. Students were subdued when I sent them back to their places. The bell was about to ring and we would pick up on the subject the next day. 

I used this lesson plan for twenty-five years and it never failed. Then, one day, I heard something completely unexpected. Susie spoke up, one of my favorite students, but still plain-looking and gawky at thirteen. The lesson was finished. The bell was about to ring. Classmates were thinking about labeling and the cruelty that inevitably follows. Susie had her hand up. Clearly, she hoped to have the final say. 

I called on her and she explained in an anguished voice, “You know, Mr. Viall, the other kids label me. They call me a ‘dog.’”

For once I was speechless. We all know teens can be cruel. No one had ever exposed this so perfectly, in such timely fashion, in its starkest forms. The word “dog” hung in the air like a Nazi victim on a scaffold.

We had just devoted an entire period to a discussion of human cruelty. Now those who had inflicted pain on Susie saw themselves, as it were, in a mirror. The image reflected wasn’t flattering.

“That is absolutely wrong,” I spluttered, my voice shaking with emotion. I looked to her peers for explanation. Chastened by a victim’s revelation, no one dared utter a word. The bell rang and I stood and stared as Susie’s tormentors snuck out the door and made their escape to lunch. 

***

            If you’re a dedicated teacher, and in my experience most of my peers were, you always try to improve. In the summer of 1996, I spent two weeks gathering material and writing a new handout on the Holocaust. The plan was to couple it with the story of Las Casas in the fall.

The first lesson remained the same. Now, on the second day, we addressed dehumanization in more modern forms. We began by listing basic terms: Holocaust; Gestapo, Nazi, swastika; genocide, dictator, and more. The last page of the reading, which we began in class, was nothing more than a large photo of Hitler’s face in black and white. I had scrawled “a cesspool in the head” across his forehead before running off copies. As expected, few students knew what a cesspool was. I had Rob, a young man we nicknamed Mr. Dictionary for his prowess with words, explain. 

I did not expect to find there were those who did not recognize Hitler. We started every class after that by turning to the page where the dictator was shown. I wanted to insure everyone knew who it was, with the drooping hair and toothbrush mustache.

 

(That’s one of many basics a teacher discovers must be taught only by teaching. That’s a car you want in the parking lot.)

The story was filled with hard-to-pronounce names. So we read the opening section aloud. I told students not to worry about names and dates once I turned them loose. They should try to imagine a world gone mad. The story was titled HITLER’S BLACK HARVEST.

Angie, a hard-working young lady and one of my favorites, volunteered to be first to read:

     Most students today know a little about the Holocaust. They usually know gas chambers were disguised as showers. They realize Jews had to wear yellow stars. Some know six million Jews died. Only a few know non-Jewish victims totaled another ten million.

     Still, it seems impossible to come to grips with the horror. To understand the truth we must focus on the broken heart. We must go beneath the surface of the printed page. 

We must dive into an ocean of blood.     

I asked Angie to stop a moment and allowed the words “ocean of blood” to sink in. Then she kept going:

We must watch as German troops arrest Israel Lewi. Then we must see his tearful daughter rush up to say goodbye to her father. We must see a soldier’s anger as he orders the poor girl to open her mouth. Then gasp as he fires his pistol down Liebe Lewi’s throat. 

“How many of you would want to say goodbye to your father in this situation?” I asked. You personalize history and every kid can sense how terrible this must have been.

Caitlyn volunteered to read next:

We must see Icek Bekerman steal a piece of leather to make into a pair of shoelaces, from the shop where he works as a Nazi slave. See him caught. Then see him hanged.

We must see Sophie Scholl and brother Hans, not Jews but “good Germans,” protest Nazi rule. See them paint: “Freedom!” and “Down with Hitler!” on building walls. We must shudder as they are arrested, placed on trial, sentenced to death, and beheaded.

It is not easy to watch what we must watch. And sometimes we must listen. Hear the cries of a nameless Polish prisoner. His head has been caved in and both legs broken when police torture him to make him talk. His battered body makes a thump when he is thrown into a wood coffin and sent to the ovens to be burned. Listen now. Listen as he regains consciousness at the last second, screaming: “Open up! Open up! I am still alive!”

Listen. Let his terrified shouts enter your soul. Then you may be ready to understand.

We stopped again to let the horror sink in. Silence hung over the room. I warned the reading would be hard to take and told everyone to go ahead and pick up where we left off. They would be looking evil in the eye and I asked them to see what they might discover.

I took a seat and settled down to paperwork. At first, the hush was broken only by rustling pages. Then I heard quiet crying. I glanced up and saw a girl with tears running down her cheeks. I thought: I hope I haven’t gone too far, but I want students to feel the evil.

I focused again on grading. The sound of crying grew. Melissa, normally a most enthusiastic young lady, was weeping. 

            Now I was worried. Had I delved too deeply into horror? Frankly, I feared some parent might complain. “Are you okay?” I asked Melissa. She sniffed, said yes, wiped her face, and turned a page. “Are you guys okay?” I asked the class. Nods. Tears. Most kept reading.

            I started watching. Some were turning red, stifling their horror. Finally, I said, “Look, if this is too hard, you don’t have to finish.” One or two folded their handouts back to the first page and wiped their faces. 

Melissa choked out a few words and kept going. “No….we….need….to….know this,” she sobbed. Classmates nodded and most kept reading till the bell rang, signaling an end to the period.

I asked everyone who could to finish the handout for homework.

The next day we focused on “empathy” once more, what I always called the “antidote for hate.” I believed it was possible to teach students to have empathy and hoped the idea stuck.

The definition again: “You can feel what another person feels.”

In my experience, most teens grasped this concept quickly, that we are all human, that we are all the same.

In my class we discussed this matter the very first day.

The Moore's Ford Bridge Lynching: Four Victims Out of 4,400

Recently, I got interested in the story of the Moore’s Ford Bridge lynching in 1946. There’s a move afoot to release grand jury testimony long kept secret. Here’s what I found about the story:

Too often, this flag flew outside the New York City headquarters of the NAACP.

On July 25, 1946, a lynch mob (see: Moore’s Ford Bridge Lynching) stops a car being driven by Loy Harrison, a white Georgia farmer. His passengers are two black couples, who work as sharecroppers on his land. Harrison has just bailed one of the men, Roger Malcolm, out of jail after he was accused of stabbing a white man in an argument, eleven days earlier. Roger, his wife Dorothy, George W. Dorsey and Mae Murray Dorsey are tied to trees and riddled with bullets.

Mr. Dorsey had committed no crime—but had served five years in the Pacific with the U.S. Army. His mistake was to make it clear he was proud of his service. He had been home from war less than a year.

Dorothy Malcolm happens to be his sister.

Eugene Talmedge is running for governor of Georgia at the time. Not long before the murders he had come to Walton County to warn that if blacks were allowed to vote they would overturn segregation in the schools and hotels and dash the Jim Crow system to pieces.

Negroes, he stated “should stay home and not attempt to vote.”

On another occasion, he stated firmly, “Non-segregation in our schools will never work as long as red blood runs in white men’s veins.”

Even the most harmless “race-mixing” bothered Talmadge. He once expressed great displeasure after seeing a singing quartet, The Mariners, two white men and two black men, on Arthur Godfrey’s television show. Even worse, he insisted, were the dance numbers, during which, “Negro men frequently are seen mixed up in the dancing ensembles with scantily-clad white females.” Talmadge suggested that the South should boycott such shows.

The New York Times (writing about old testimony being unsealed in 2018), notes that 25 F.B.I. agents were sent south to investigate the Moore’s Ford Bridge murders. They worked for four months, subpoenaed 106 individuals, interviewed 2,790 people, and came away with nothing. Even J. Edgar Hoover was stunned. “The arrogance of the…white population was unbelievable and the fear of the Negroes was almost unbelievable,” he said later.

*

The article in the Times catches my interest; and I go looking for details. The Equal Justice Initiative describes the Moore’s Ford Bridge lynching, adding several interesting details. Dorothy Malcolm is seven months pregnant on the night the car is stopped at the bridge.

Her husband had been arrested for allegedly stabbing a white farmer, Barnette Hester during a fight.

The mob tied the two men to a large oak tree. Mrs. Malcolm recognized several members of the mob and called on them to spare her husband. This led to her death and the death of Mrs. Dorsey. Now they “knew too much.” The four victims were shot at least 60 times at close range, including several shotgun blasts. President Harry Truman ordered a federal investigation. A reward of $12,500 was offered for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the murderers. But the white community remained silent on what had taken place and the black community was too cowed to talk.

Many years later, when the FBI reopened its investigation, those who might know something still refused to talk.

In response to charges that he was withholding information, Walton County Superior Court Judge Marvin Sorrells, whose father worked for Walton County law enforcement in 1946, vowed that “until the last person of my daddy’s generation dies, no one will talk.”

The funeral of George Dorsey. What must the mourners have felt?

*

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) fills in other details, including the ages of the victims: Roger, 24, Dorothy, 20, George, 28 and Mae, 24. According to the SPLC trouble started when,

Tempers flared and Roger Malcolm stabbed Hester in the back with what witnesses described as an ice pick, delivering an injury that would plague him for the rest of his life.

“I know that Hester eventually died because he never got over the stab wound,” a cousin told investigators in 2001.

Hester family members grabbed and held Roger Malcolm while Walton County Sheriff’s deputies Lewis Howard and C.J. “Doc” Sorrells, the future sheriff, came to make an arrest.

The SPLC notes that bond, which was originally set at $600, was dropped to $500. This lower figure meant Malcolm could be bailed out of jail. Harrison, the white farmer, offered to front the money and said he’d take Malcolm and his wife back to his place after he was released. The Dorseys came along in part because they wanted to do some shopping in Monroe, the county seat (about 20 miles east of Atlanta). Loy Harrison was offering them a  ride.

Harrison chose not to take the direct route home, however, but went by way of the Moore’s Ford Bridge. There a mob of 20-25 men stopped the car. Harrison would later testify that a “tall, dignified looking man of about 65, wearing a broad-brimmed hat” led the mob which surrounded the vehicle.

“The leader looked like a regular businessman,” said Harrison, an early suspect in the killings who maintained his innocence for years.

First, the mob pulled Roger Malcolm from the car and said, “We want that nigger,” Harrison said.

Next, a member of the mob pointed to another of the passengers and said “We want you, too, Charlie’,” Harrison recalled.

Harrison, realizing they had identified the wrong Dorsey, replied “That’s not Charlie. That’s George.”

An armed man with a gun prodded Harrison and warned: “Keep your damned mouth shut. This ain’t your party.”

The two men were being marched off to some nearby woods when one of the women started calling out mob members by name. The leader of the mob, according to Harrison, turned and said “Git them women. Bring ‘em over here. They know too much.”

The two men were tied at the hands and ropes were put around the women’s necks. They were then shot with what investigators determined to be at least two different shotguns and multiple handguns enough times to make the bodies difficult to identify. Police later pulled bullets from multiple tree trunks.

Harrison told investigators a gunman took him to the bridge and held him there as he heard gunshots go off nearby. Once the shooting stopped, Harrison said, the leader of the mob stared him down and asked “Have you recognized anyone here?”

After Harrison said he didn’t, a member of the group recommended killing him anyway.

“Let’s shoot him, too, then there will be no evidence,” the mob member said.

Harrison walked away from the scene after the leader of the group stepped in and stopped any more killing, Harrison said.

Loy Harrison was a suspect from the start.

The governor of Georgia at the time, Ellis Arnell, had previously favored a state civil rights act. Arnell expected justice to be done, since, he said, “15 to 20 of the mob members are known by name.”

This was not to be the case. Talmadge, who had once said “nothing can be gained by giving equal rights” to black people, and usually referred to them with the “n-word,” then considered in many circles to be acceptable, won the 1946 election (but died before he could be inaugurated). 

As noted, a veil of silence quickly fell over the Monroe/Walton County community. Those “who spoke to the federal grand jury paid a steep price.” Two white men beat up Lamar Howard, 19, a black employee of the local ice house, after they heard he had talked with authorities about what he knew. One of the attackers later admitted he had pounded Howard. An all-white jury refused to convict.

Another problem investigators faced was poor security at the site of the lynching. Souvenier hunters trampled the spot, making gathering evidence even more challenging. The SPLC explains:

Donald Garrett, a Navy veteran [and white] just home to Loganville, Georgia, from World War II, was one of those souvenir collectors.

Garrett told the Georgia Bureau of Investigation in 2005 that he went to Moore’s Ford Bridge the day after the killings, eventually leaving with a human tooth pulled from a pool of blood at the site.

Garrett gave the tooth to the daughter of a local politician who, Garrett recalled, wore it as a charm on a bracelet around her wrist.

The tooth was never recovered.

Lamar Howard, after his beating.

*

            Investigations came up empty in 1946; but as times changed, there were talks of reopening the case periodically. In 1992 Clinton Adams, a white man, told the F.B.I. that when he was ten he witnessed the killings. He said he remained silent for fear of his life. His story could not be corroborated.

            It was long assumed that the KKK had a hand in the murders. In 2008 authorities received a tip. A former Klan leader, George Hinton, had possibly hidden evidence on his farm not far from Monroe. Agents from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation followed up on the tip. They were told that Hinton had been the “gunsmith” for the local Klan in the 1930s and 40s. A search warrant was obtained. Investigators combed his property. Among other items, they found a Klan roster from the period of the lynching. E. L. Almand, who owned the funeral home were the four bodies were sent, was listed as “Exalted Cyclops” for 1939.

Again, many whites had to know the truth at the time; and many blacks had to have suspicions, too.

When asked about the investigation in 1992, black World War II veteran Sidney Clark said many who lived in Walton County knew better than to speak with authorities then.

“Everybody was keeping their mouths shut,” Clark told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “The Jim Crow laws were in effect then, and they worked good.”

*

The story interested me and I continued to check for more details. The Chattanooga Times Free Press added to the sad saga, in an article in March 2018. Loy Harrison was a suspect from the start:

An FBI report noted Harrison was a former Ku Klux Klansman and well-known bootlegger. The initial investigation lasted roughly six months and yielded dozens of possible suspects, some simply because they were Hester's relatives, friends or neighbors, or because they had no alibis. Ultimately, there were no indictments.

In 2010, Terry Powis, associate professor of anthropology at Kennesaw State University, led a group of students in in an archaeological dig at the Moore’s Ford Bridge site. Vivian James, a Kennesaw State University anthropology student, told the paper the work had uncovered dozens of bullets, .22, .38 and .44 caliber, and casings, and yielded a preliminary ballistics analysis.

The Marietta Daily Journal quoted one of the diggers:

“As an African-American, I realize that 64-years ago it is quite possible that I could have been one of these victims,” said senior Sedrie Hart, 25. “I cannot imagine how the families must have felt, and are still feeling. If my work helps bring some closure to these families, that is payment enough.”

How might the victims have felt, we must ask today—and their families later—and did guilt ever trouble the perpetrators as they aged?

*

The opening of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, earlier this year sparked renewed interest in the subject of lynching. According to an April 2018 article in the Cincinnati Enquirer a total of 4,400 African Americans were lynched in this country between the years 1877 and 1950; and that may have been an undercount. The memorial listed 15 known victims in Ohio and 168 in Kentucky, with two being killed in Butler County, the only Ohio county with more than one. Reporters for the Enquirer believed they might have unearthed stories of other victims missed previously by researchers. In 1895, for example, a black man named Noah Anderson was snatched from authorities by a white mob in New Richmond and hanged “on the highest poplar tree in Clermont County.”

Some of the 4,400 names engraved at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice.

*

The great African American poet, Langston Hughes, captured the anger of his people in the Moore’s Ford Bridge era in a poem written three years before. In 1943, the U.S. was locked in war with Germany and Japan. African Americans were serving in increasing numbers under the flag. Hughes noted race riots that had occurred that year in places like Detroit and Beaumont, Texas.

“Beaumont to Detroit” by Langston Hughes

Looky here, America
What you done done –
Let things drift
Until the riots come

Now your policemen
Let the mobs run free.
I reckon you don’t care
Nothing about me.

You tell me that hitler
Is a mighty bad man.
I guess he took lessons
From the ku klux klan.

You tell me mussolini’s
Got an evil heart.
Well, it mus-a been in Beaumont
That he had his start –

Cause everything that hitler
And mussolini do
Negroes get the same
Treatment from you

You jim crowed me
Before hitler rose to power –
And you’re still jim crowing me
Right now, this very hour.

Yet you say we’re fightin
For democracy.
Then why don’t democracy
Include me?

I ask you this question
Cause I want to know
How long I got to fight
BOTH HITLER – AND JIM CROW.

*

Today, when Americans argue about whether or not NFL players should kneel during the National Anthem, a little history might help us all form more nuanced opionions. In fact, throughout American history many whites who wanted to insure Negroes remained “in their place” feared African Americans who went off to war.

Too often, racists complained, these men (for in those days no women were allowed to fight) returned home expecting to be treated fairly in the country for which they had just risked their lives.

Peter C. Baker, writing in The New Yorker, explains:

When the First World War broke out, black thinkers and writers debated the merits of signing up to fight for a country that functionally denied them full citizenship. Three hundred and eighty thousand black men heeded W. E. B. Du Bois’s call to enlist in the segregated Army, many of them hoping that doing so would increase the standing of blacks on the home front. But for much of white America, front-line military service by blacks undercut the claims of racial superiority around which their lives—and their economies—were structured.

In a speech on the Senate floor in 1917, Mississippi Senator James K. Vardaman warned that the return of black veterans to the South would “inevitably lead to disaster.” Once you “impress the negro with the fact that he is defending the flag” and “inflate his untutored soul with military airs,” Vardaman cautioned, it was a short step to the conclusion that “his political rights must be respected.”

When black soldiers did return—and did act differently—many whites were appalled. Baker continues:

Whites speculated that, while stationed in Europe, black soldiers had enjoyed wartime liaisons with white French women, increasing their lust—which, in the white imagination, was already dangerously high—for sex with white American women. Many black veterans were denied the benefits and disability pay they’d been promised. In the first summer after the war…anti-black riots erupted in more than twenty American cities, including Houston, Chicago, and Washington, D.C. “This is the right time to show them what will and what will not be permitted, and thus save them much trouble in the future,” one Louisiana newspaper opined, in an editorial titled “Nip It In the Bud.” 

At the time, Du Bois, one of the founders of the NCAAP,  could write in an editorial about black veterans arriving back home, “We return. We return from fighting. We return fighting.”

*

The same kind of problems arose in the wake of World War II. George Dorsey, lynched at Moore’s Ford Bridge was not the only black veteran to run into the same kind of racism he had been fighting abroad.

Bryan Stevenson, Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative, writing in the Milwaukee Independent,  picks up the story in detail. Throught American history,

Military service sparked dreams of racial equality for generations of African Americans. But most black veterans were not welcomed home and honored for their service. Instead, during the lynching era, many black veterans were targeted for mistreatment, violence, and murder because of their race and status as veterans. Indeed, black veterans risked violence simply by wearing their uniforms on American soil.

            In the years between the two World Wars, the number of blacks serving in the U.S. military declined dramatically. Jim Crow treatment, both in the North and in the South did not exactly spark young men to go and fight for “their” country—when that country treated them less than equally.

            A feeling of patriotism, however, swept over all Americans after the bombing of Pearl Harbor and U.S. entry into World War II. But service to the flag often made African Americans who served targets of a different kind once they returned home:

…In 1941, fewer than 4000 African Americans were serving in the armed forces, and only 12 were officers. By 1945, more than 1.2 million black men were in uniform. Even as the United States proclaimed itself the world’s greatest democracy, it was fighting the racism of Hitler’s Germany with an army that remained racially segregated through the end of the war. Black troops initially were barred from frontline combat and assigned to service duties, cleaning white officers’ rooms and latrines as orderlies and janitors. But as casualties mounted, the army sent African American troops into combat out of necessity.

No matter the sacrifices of black servicemen, Jim Crow remained the law of the land at home and in the service. Black military policemen stationed in the South could not enter restaurants where their German prisoners of war were allowed to eat. Private Bert Babero wrote that he was required “to observe a sign in the latrine, actually segregating a section of the latrine for Negro soldiers, the other being used by the German prisoners and the white soldiers.” He recalled, “[I]t made me feel here, the tyrant, is actually placed over the liberator.”

For many veterans, their first confrontation with the post-war racial caste system occurred on the bus or train that carried them home. On February 8, 1946, honorably discharged Marine Timothy Hood removed the Jim Crow sign from a trolley in Bessemer, Alabama. In response, the white street car conductor, William R. Weeks, unloaded his pistol into Mr. Hood, firing five shots. Mr. Hood staggered off the tram and crawled away, only to be arrested by the chief of police, G.B. Fant of Brighton. Fant put Mr. Hood in the back of a police car and murdered him with a single bullet to the head. Fant later alleged that Mr. Hood had “reached toward his hip pocket as if to draw a gun.” Although there was no evidence that Mr. Hood was armed, the coroner returned a finding of “justifiable homicide,” and Fant was cleared.

On February 12, 1946, Isaac Woodard, a black veteran who had served in the Philippines, boarded a Greyhound bus in Georgia, headed home to his wife in North Carolina. When the bus stopped just outside of Augusta, South Carolina, Mr. Woodard asked the driver if there was time to use the restroom, and the driver cursed at him. After a brief argument, Mr. Woodard returned to his seat. At the next stop in Batesburg, the angry driver told Mr. Woodward to exit the bus, where the local chief of police, Linwood Shull, and several other police officers were waiting.

The police beat Mr. Woodard with billy clubs and arrested him for disorderly conduct, accusing him of drinking beer in the back of the bus with other soldiers. Upon arrival at the police station, Shull continued to strike Mr. Woodard with a billy club, hitting him in the head so forcefully that he was permanently blinded.

The next morning, a local judge fined Mr. Woodard $50 and denied his request for medical attention. By the time of his release days later, Mr. Woodard did not know who or where he was. His family found him in a hospital in Aiken, South Carolina, three weeks later, after reporting him missing. “Negro veterans that fought in this war… don’t realize that the real battle has just begun in America,” Mr. Woodard later said. “They went overseas and did their duty and now they’re home and have to fight another struggle, that I think outweighs the war.”

By the mid-20th century, violent racialized attacks on black veterans were slightly more likely to result in investigations and charges against the white perpetrators, but they rarely led to convictions or punishment, even when guilt was undisputed. Under pressure from the NAACP, the federal government eventually charged Chief Shull for the attack on Mr. Woodard, but the prosecution was half-hearted at best. The United States Attorney did not interview any witnesses except the bus driver.

At trial, Shull admitted that he had blinded Mr. Woodard, but Shull’s lawyer shouted racial slurs at Mr. Woodard and told the all-white jury, “[I]f you rule against Shull, then let this South Carolina secede again.” After deliberating for 30 minutes, the jury acquitted Shull of any wrongdoing, and the courtroom broke into applause. Remarking on the outcome, Mr. Woodard said, “The Right One hasn’t tried him yet… I’m not mad at anybody… I just feel bad. That’s all. I just feel bad.”

Maceo Snipes had served in the army for two and a half years and received an honorable discharge when he returned home to Taylor County, Georgia, to farm his father’s land. On July 17, 1946, Mr. Snipes voted in the Democratic primary for governor. The next day, several white men in a pick-up truck went to Mr. Snipes’s house and a white veteran named Edward Williamson shot him. Mr. Snipes walked for several miles seeking help, but died before he could find any. Williamson, who belonged to a politically powerful family, told a coroner’s inquest that he had gone to collect a debt from Mr. Snipes and Mr. Snipes pulled a knife on him. The inquest ruled the killing was an act of self-defense. Taylor County, Georgia, later honored its World War II veterans with two engraved, segregated plaques listing white and black veterans separately. Though an integrated plaque was added in 2007, the segregated originals remained.

In a separate story, the Equal Justice Initiative outlines the experience of Hosea Williams, who later went on to become an important leader in the civil rights movement:

… Williams was threatened by a lynch mob at the age of 14 in Attapulgus, Georgia, for befriending a white girl. Even after this terrifying experience of racial violence, Mr. Williams enlisted to serve in World War II as part of the all-black unit of General George Patton’s Third Army. During a battle in France, an artillery shell hit Mr. Williams’s platoon, killing the other 12 soldiers and wounding Mr. Williams; when the ambulance transporting him to the hospital was hit by another artillery shell, Mr. Williams was again the lone survivor and spent 13 months at a British hospital recovering from his injuries. 

After the war, Mr. Williams headed home to Attapulgus with a Purple Heart and the assistance of a cane. While he was wearing his uniform, Mr. Williams was brutally assaulted by a mob of white men at the bus station in Americus, Georgia, after he attempted to drink out of the white-only drinking fountain. The mob left him for dead. People at the bus station called the town’s black undertaker, who found a pulse and brought Mr. Williams to the Veterans Administration hospital. Lying in the hospital for eight weeks due to his new, “peacetime” injuries, Mr. Williams found himself lamenting that he “had fought for the wrong side.”

Nearly lynched, nearly killed abroad, and nearly lynched again upon returning home, Hosea Williams survived and continued to fight for human rights. He went on to help organize the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery, served as Executive Director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and was jailed more than 125 times for participating in civil rights demonstrations. Mr. Williams relentlessly challenged his country to honor at home the ideals of freedom and equality it fought for abroad.

And that is what I discovered one day—in retirement from teaching—about one lynching in America.

And the history of lynching.

And the stories of just a few of the 4,400 dead.

Negro soldiers, as they were then called, in England in 1944.
You could dodge enemy bullets overseas and be felled by bullets at home.