Ala. boat dock brawl wasn’t just a fight. It was a reminder.
I thought about how my grandfather changed his voice when he talked to white people as I watched a string of viral videos recently.
In them, a group of white boaters pummel and kick a Black dock worker for doing his job at Riverfront Park in Montgomery, Alabama – a major spot during the domestic slave trade. Brave Black people rushed to the dock worker’s aid. Others were so enraged by the evil scene – and, no doubt, centuries of racism – that they sought retribution and/or justice, making decisions that might have proved deadly when my granddad was a young man in Jim Crow Alabama, an age of lynching and terror.
Just hours before the attack and the awful melee that followed it, my husband and I visited Selma’s infamous Edmund Pettus Bridge before heading to the Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Incarceration and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery. The haunting and beautiful sculpture garden – blocks away from the riverfront – features the names of the 4,400 Black people lynched in the United States between 1877 and 1950 carved in rustcolored steel.
Afterward, we peered through a wrought iron fence at the First White House of the Confederacy before driving 20 miles to Prattville, the site of my late granddad’s 1931 birth – even though I rarely heard him mention it or anything about his life in Alabama.
From what I did glean from him before his death, I know his life in Prattville and later Chattanooga, Tennessee, was hard and often painful. Black people had a place. We were no longer slaves, but we definitely were not free to claim or exercise human dignities.
My grandfather and his six brothers and mother were among the millions of Black Americans who moved from the Jim Crow South to Ohio and other states in the Midwest, north and west during the Great Migration between 1910 and 1970.
My mom was an infant when my grandparents got their first home in Cleveland. My ancestors sought opportunities away from oppression whitewashed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and others who would have you believe that Black people benefited from slavery – an economic system that saw children ripped from their mothers’ arms to be sold, used, battered and abused to the day they died.
My grandfather died in 2004, but he has never really left me. I heard his sweet and strong voice in my head as we drove by Prattville’s city hall and through its small, charming downtown. We stopped only long enough to take pictures at what is left of the Daniel Pratt Cotton Gin factory.
Carl Ruth Robinson wasn’t a subtle man, and neither was the way his voice shifted when he talked to white people. I was a preteen helping him work on one of several homes he owned in our Cleveland neighborhood the first time I noticed how his voice shifted.
Before the phone rang, he was waxing on confidently about the news of the day and what was going on with this or that family member.
It went beyond the code switching most people do to match their audience they are speaking to.
When he picked up the phone, my granddad was all “yes, ma’am” and “no, ma’am” the way the Black bellhops and waiters spoke in the classic black-and-white movies I’ve seen. Submissive.
I took mental note that day the way America’s Black children have taken note since people from the kingdoms of Ndongo and Kongo were kidnapped from Africa, and the ship they were on was seized by pirates on the White Lion and the Treasurer and sold in Point Comfort near Jamestown, Virginia. There was no mention of the kingdoms of Ndongo or Kongo, or how the White Lion and the Treasurer were American slavery’s Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria in my schoolbooks.
I was a sophomore at Ohio University the first time I heard the phrase “trans-Atlantic slave trade,” along with other brutal historical facts – many of which will be restricted if Senate Bill 83 and other legislation pending in the Ohio Statehouse are approved.
I did not know much about the psychological trauma that came with public lynching until doing research for an article after investigators in 2005 exhumed the body of Emmett Till – a 14-year-old Chicago boy accused of whistling at a white woman and lynched by a white mob in 1955 in Mississippi. It was far more prevalent there, but lynching was not only a tool used in the South as a means to keep Black people in line, terrorized and submissive. Nonthreatening.
As found for my 2005 article for the Dayton Daily News, there were at least 17 black people killed by mobs in Ohio –including a man accused, but never tried or convicted, in the death of police Sgt. Charles Collis of Lagonda in 1904. A mob of 4,000 watched as that man, Richard Dixon (sometimes Richard Dickerson) of Cynthiana, Kentucky, was lynched.
As the Dayton Evening Herald recorded and I recounted, men and boys threw stones and emptied their guns into the Black man’s mutilated flesh. They joked with neighbors as his tattered clothes fluttered in the wind “like shreds of a battle flag.”
There are more than 4,000 other examples that remind us there was a time not too long ago that a group of white people could pummel a Black dock worker for just doing his job and nothing would have been done about it – legally or otherwise.
It always bothered me that my funny, loving and ridiculously smart granddad changed the inflection in his voice around white people. Who could blame him?
There’s a chance neither I nor any of his other decedents would be here today if he hadn’t as a young, Black American male.
Amelia Robinson is the opinion and community engagement editor for the Columbus Dispatch, where this column was first published. She is a lifelong Ohioan.