My mother had to attend a sibling’s funeral earlier this year. She felt such grief over losing her brother, the last of a set of twins, and she spent time thinking of her own mortality as well. She also had to contend with the prospect of traveling to a state she never had much love for – her home state of Mississippi.
I was never sure if her dislike grew out of the isolation of farm life or the loneliness of growing up the baby in a large family when her much-older siblings had moved away.
When people ask me where she’s from, I always respond, Mississippi Burning. She didn’t experience the type of violence depicted in the movie, but racism was everywhere and she knew it.
She used to tell stories of black families who lost their land to crooked whites or about the time the school system, so separate and so unequal, became unaccredited and my grandfather sent her to New Orleans to live with one of her grown sisters.
My mother left Mississippi willingly when my father, now wearing the uniform of a government that didn’t really respect his people, asked my mother to marry him.
Many military members retire in their home states, those places where they grew up and where many family members still live. Not my mother. She has never wanted to go back and live in Mississippi. And, when the great reverse migration started to occur, and Atlanta became Hot-lanta, she was amazed.
“I don’t see why you young folk want to live there,” she said. When the word “there” came out of her mouth, you could tell “there” was a bad place as far as she was concerned.
Now I wonder if this week’s historic U.S. Senate apology to the families of lynching victims will make any difference to my mother.
From 1880 to 1960, nearly 5,000 Americans were documented as having been lynched, mostly in the South, without trials and often with the knowledge of local officials, who allowed mob lychings to become picture-taking, public spectacles.
The House of Representatives passed three anti-lynching bills over the decades, but all failed in the Senate until this week, when Louisiana Senator Mary L. Landrieu’s co-sponsored legislation was fulfilled with the formal apology. The white senator said she and her co-sponsor, George Allen, R-VA, were motivated by reading a pictorial book of the history of lynching in America.
Many of the relatives sitting in the Senate gallery said the apology is late and it won’t bring anyone back, but it’s a good idea to admit our mistakes.
My mother is now in her sixties. I can’t tell you her exact age, or I would never be allowed to go home again. She does have good memories of her childhood, and she can even now speak warmly of visiting family who had managed to build wonderful homes on beautiful Mississippi land despite the state’s ugly past.
I know the Senate apology for lynching won’t change the bad memories of so many but, just like my mother, we can create new ones. There is something cleansing about facing up to the past, and perhaps no one knows that more than the U.S. Senate.
