The Root Of All Hate

On May 18th, 1918 in Brooks County Georgia, a white mob lynched Hayes Turner, a Black man who may or may not have been involved in the killing of Hampton Smith, a white farmer well known for his hateful mistreatment of impoverished Black sharecroppers.

Hayes’s wife, Mary, was 8 months pregnant. In her grief and horror she vowed to make out warrants for the arrest of her husband’s killers – not that that would have made one bit of difference in getting justice in a place where white supremacy was the accepted law of the land. But the mob didn’t take kindly to Mary’s threats. Threatening white folks, even empty threats, could not be tolerated. So they figured they might as well lynch her as well and the next day they came back and did exactly that. They bound her feet and arms, strung her upside down, lit a fire beneath her, and roasted her to death.

Mary was still alive when the mob took a butcher knife to her abdomen and cut her unborn son from her womb. When the baby fell to the ground, a member of the mob crushed his head with his boot heel.  Mary, Hayes, and Baby Turner, are all memorialized in the Equal Justice Initiative’s  Lynching Museum in Montgomery Alabama. It requires a lot of pure-white hate to kill a family, especially in such a grotesque fashion.

28 years after Mary was murdered, Isaac Woodard, a Black army sergeant on his way home to South Carolina after serving in WWII, got into an argument when the driver wouldn’t stop to let him take a pee break. When the bus finally stopped in Batesburg SC, the local chief of police pulled Isaac off the bus and beat him so savagely that he was left unconscious and permanently blind. The incident made national headlines. The police chief was acquitted by an all-white jury.

According to the Equal Justice Initiative, there were some 4,440 race-based lynchings in the United States between 1877 and 1950. A rate of more than one every week. Many lynchings - like Mary’s – were not the nice, quick murder at the end of a rope that we imagine a lynching to be, but rather live burnings, limb amputations, non-fatal bullet injuries before the final blow, plugs of flesh removed with cork screws, disembowelment, beheadings, and almost always accompanied by a crowd of men, women, and children gawking and enjoying the festivities. It takes hate.

James Allen set out to publish a picture book of racial lynchings in America, eventually published in 1999 under the title Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America. But where to go to get such gruesome photos? Allen traveled the south and sought out the postcards that were often produced from photos of the event. He found folks who proudly showed him the family heirloom postcards from their granddaddy’s collection. I purchased the book in 2001, looked at a few of the photographs, closed the book and put it out of view in my bookcase never to be opened again.

But of course neither the hate nor the lynchings magically disappeared in 1950. A lynching that I remember well occurred on June 7th, 1998, in Jasper Texas. James Byrd was chained to the rear bumper of a pickup truck driven by three white men, and dragged down a paved road for over three miles. Police were able to tell that James was alive for much of his ordeal by looking at the now non-existent flesh on James’s forearms where he tried to hold himself up off the pavement. James’s ordeal came to an end when his body hit the edge of a culvert severing both his right arm and his head.

A German group who trafficked in hate, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, aka the Nazis, specialized in hating Jewish people. According to James Whitman, author of Hitler’s American Model, and professor at Yale School of Law, “America in the early 20th century was the leading racist jurisdiction in the world.” Nazis were eager to figure out methods to humiliate Jewish people and keep them in their place, segregated from “white” Germans. According to Whitman, “As a result, Nazi lawyers looked very closely at and were ultimately influenced by America’s Jim Crow race laws.”

Before any of those acts of hate, on July 11 and 12, 1864, Confederate General Jubal Early attacked Union troops near Washington DC in what came to be known as The Battle of Fort Stevens, in an attempt to take control and re-imagine the capitol from a symbol of freedom and equality to servitude and white supremacy, a notion and nation built on hate. The rebels, run down and weary from their prolonged fight for the right to keep other humans in bondage, were repelled. Early’s goal was to fly the Confederate Flag - America’s own, unique, lasting symbol of hate - over the nation’s capitol. The attempt to fly the flag was unsuccessful. But that changed during the Insurrection of January 6th when a mob, fueled by hate, successfully flew their chosen symbol inside the capitol building for the first time ever.

Jason Van Tatenhove, former longtime spokesperson for the Oath Keepers testified at the January 6thCongressional hearings and described how the Oath Keepers, prominent at the insurrection, embrace “straight up racism…(January 6th) was all about race”.

Residents of Anna IL like to joke that Anna stands for, “Ain’t no Niggers allowed” after dark. Just one more of thousands of Sundown towns where Black Americans were tolerated and allowed to spend their money during daylight, but prohibited after the sun went down. Penalties for disobeying were swift and severe. The joke and remembrance still lingers today.

When you read the news, or just look out your window, hate seems to be the new normal. I mean it’s always been there. But the depth of the hate that seems to be everywhere seems even more pervasive now than then. From the horror and sadness of the clearly race-based murders in Buffalo NY to the unspeakable and un-understandable murders of little kids and their school teachers in Uvalde. I don’t know what or who the Uvalde murderer hated. I only know that he hated something and that 21 people died as a result.

The inability of so many recent Supreme Court nominees to agree that the 1954 case of Brown v Board of Education, ensuring that all American kids, regardless of skin color, are entitled to the same educational excellence is settled, non-negotiable law seemed revealing. It seemed hateful to not joyfully embrace a uniquely American idea that made the country better. The same justices who did agree that Roe v Wade is settled law voted to overturn it anyway claiming the old “States’ Rights” dog whistle – a thing that did not exist in any real way until the country started arguing over the rights of one human to own another. The decision, which 61% of Americans believe made the country worse, sure had the stench of hate and scorn more than any actual concern about states’ rights.

Casually and disrespectfully calling the deadly pandemic that emanated from China and that has so far claimed over a million American lives “Kung Flu” unleashed a hate-fueled reign of terror on Asian Americans.

Disallowing any teaching of a history that does not support our long-accepted Anglo-centric national narrative seems to be just one more thing related to hate.

When a politician campaigning in Greensboro NC in the aughts said to an almost all-white audience, “We believe that the best of America is in the small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of your hard working very patriotic, um, very, um, pro America areas of this great nation.” Whatever it was she was trying to say, she was most certainly not referring to Black or brown or red America. As the “Real America”. She was yet another politician blowing the dog whistle of America’s original hate.

When a presidential candidate campaigned from Philadelphia MS in the late-ish 20th century from the exact small town where three civil rights workers had been murdered by the local sheriff’s deputy and three of his KKK pals a couple of decades earlier, forming the story-line for the movie, Mississippi Burning, he was also blowing the dog whistle of America’s foundational hate.  America responded to the whistle and voted him into the White House.

In 1989 when a prominent white NYC businessman ran full page adds in four NYC papers at a 2022 cost adjusted for inflation of $203,000 calling for the death penalty for four Black male youths who police suspected may have been involved in the rape and brutal assault of a jogger in Central Park, but had not yet been tried in a court of law, that was a lesson on how to use hate to achieve one’s goals or support one’s beliefs.

When those same boys, now middle aged men, were released from prison 30 years later when DNA proved their innocence, that same businessman’s lack of an apology was one more lesson in how to perpetuate hate.

During these summer months I write mostly from my rear patio that faces the VA Medical Center. The flag, visible from my deck, is flown at half-mast whenever there’s another mass murder. And always I wonder, with our daily national carnage and hate, why isn’t it flown at half-mast every single day? Why was it at full mast during those 16 mass murders that occurred in the 10 days between Buffalo and Uvalde? Or the 15 that occurred just on Memorial Day?

As America wrings its collective national hands and wonders where did all this new spate of hate come from, bear two things in mind: It’s not new. It got here in 1619. And it comes from our long history and long reluctance to deal with race.

Race is our national trauma…our national abuse. By not dealing with it, or talking honestly about it, or getting professional help - it’s made us sick. So here we are, wondering what happened to the America we thought we knew. Race happened to it.