Country’s white Americans must learn from Black community
I agree with Sen. Lamar Alexander in his column for the The Commercial Appeal on June 10. Alexander states that “it will take changing behavior” and that “will not be as easy as changing laws” to get our country to stop our racist behavior and let go of deep-seated cruel mindsets.
Harper Lee’s book To Kill a Mockingbird was set in the Deep South of the 1930’s, almost a century ago. Her book was published in 1960 and the movie released in 1962 amid the Civil Rights Movement. Atticus Finch, the white attorney defending a Black man wrongly accused of rape, tries to explain to his young daughter, Scout, the bigoted cruelties practiced in their Alabama town telling her you never really know a person until you stand in his shoes and walk around in them.
Atticus attempted to do that in his heartrending plea to the all-white male jury that the rape, Tom Robinson, a Black man, was accused of could factually not have taken place. His eloquent summary fell on the deaf ears of white men who abided by Jim Crow laws established in 1874-1975 to separate the white and Black races in the South and they found Tom guilty.
In 1989, John Grisham wrote, A Time to Kill, his first novel, which was rejected by many publishers. It was made into a movie in 1996 and takes place in Mississippi in the 1980’s where racial tensions historically run deep. A Black father is accused of murdering the two young white supremacists who raped his 10year old daughter and left her for dead after the rope they lynched her with broke. Jake Brigance, a young white attorney, defends the father, Carl Lee Hailey.
In Jake’s closing to the jury he asks them to close their eyes because he is going to tell them a story. He then describes in slow agonizingly brutal detail the rape and torture of Carl Lee’s daughter by the white rapists. He takes a final long pause and then says, “Now imagine she’s white.” This jury returns a not guilty verdict.
There are numerous excellent books and movies that can educate and entertain people into rethinking their behavior and bias’.
The Tennessee Historical Justice Coalition is composed of citizens across this state whose aim is to enlighten the public about injustices, lynching and arson, that have been buried in Tennessee’s past. We need to rip out the roots of racism still being watered by white citizens.
My dear friend and mentor Elizabeth Queener, is a volunteer for this coalition. She set up a fund at the Community Foundation in honor of Cordie Cheek, 17, accused of raping a white girl in 1935. The same era Tom Robinson in To Kill a Mockingbird was almost lynched. Cordie was indicted and released for lack of evidence, then kidnapped near Fisk University and taken to his home in the Glendale community in Maury County.
Word spread he was to be lynched and at least 125 people showed up, their car lights shining on his trembling body as he was castrated, lynched and then his body riddled with bullets. The Cordie Cheek Fund is for the development of Maury County African American History.
It has been said that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. We are at a turning point in our nation and we must change our national behavior. I grew up saying the Pledge of Allegiance which ends “with liberty and justice for all.”
That time has come. We need to mean what we say.
Laura Turner is a resident of Franklin, Tennessee.