The DISH
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Volume 10 Issue 25…Dedicated
to the Dialogue on Race…June
22, 2007
By John Burl Smith
When considering the words perpetuate or perpetuity, terms and phrases, such as
everlasting, eternity, unlimited in duration to the point of being inalienable,
come to mind. On the other hand, denial is the refusal to acknowledge the
truth, to disown or disavow acts and/or allegations levied by a plaintiff.
Slavery poses such a dilemma in the United States (US), where perpetuating the
slave masters' mind-set and denying any responsibility for slavery's horrors,
as well as its effects, are vital parts of the national consciousness.
This denial is self perpetuating because it allows whites to maintain a
benevolent view of how they kidnapped free Africans and forced them and their
descendants into perpetual servitude in order to build the America they enjoy
today. Whites denied Africans any standing as human beings. They stripped them
of language, culture, education and spiritual development through torture,
intimidation, rape and murder. Once bond slavery ended, government regulated
Jim Crow/segregation forced blacks to accept second class citizenship.
Whites' self-perpetuating attitude reflects this sentiment: "Even if
slavery happened as blacks say, it was done to help them. Blacks ought to be
grateful to whites for getting them out of the jungle and civilizing
them." This perpetuates a "new white man's burden" symbolized by
Iraq. The US hides behind the sham that "Running the world is a
responsibility white people in the US accepted with great reluctance and
without white people running it, it would fall apart."
Consequently, perpetuating the denial of slavery serves to prolong the myth
that slavery had no lasting impact on slave descendants. Each successive
generation of whites in the US can blame, "Bad whites for doing those
awful things to black people. I have never discriminated against anyone; so,
why should I be made to pay for something I have nothing to do with?" This
self-perpetuating denial also serves another useful purpose. It denies slave
descendants any redress for the hundreds of years we and our ancestors spent working
for free, while whites built wealth for their children to use to keep blacks
enslaved so that their children can do the same -- ad infinitum. Self-perpetuating isn't it?!!
The 'Forgotten'
Justice delayed, is justice denied.--
William Gladstone (1809 - 1898)
In the late 1980s, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) conducted research for a planned Civil Rights Memorial. Designed by Maya Lin and dedicated by the Center in 1989, the black granite monument, which is situated across the street from the Center's headquarters in Montgomery, Alabama, contains the names of 40 people slain during the civil rights era.
The Center published Free At Last, a book that tells
the stories of these civil rights martyrs. It was distributed in concert with
the Memorial's dedication in 1989 and updated in 2004. Jerry Mitchell,
investigative reporter and writer for The Clarion-Ledger in Jackson,
Mississippi, used the book as a road map in efforts to solve these civil rights
murders.
Mitchell's reporting resulted in the 1994 conviction of Byron de la Beckwith
for the 1963 murder of Medgar Evers, the 1998 conviction of Imperial Wizard Sam
Bowers for the death of Vernon Dahmer, the 2003 conviction of Ernest Avants for
the murder of caretaker Ben Chester White, and the conviction of Edgar Ray
Killen for helping orchestrate the Neshoba County murders. His stories also
contributed to the investigation that led to the indictment of James Ford Seale
for the murders of Henry Hezekiah Dee and Charles Eddie Moore.
Although the SPLC Civil Rights Memorial contains only 40 names, SPLC's research
uncovered the names of dozens of men and women who died between 1952 and 1968
under circumstances suggesting they were the victims of racially motivated
violence. According to SPLC President Richard Cohen, "We suspect that some
were killed by white supremacists to intimidate the black community or to
thwart the Civil Rights Movement."
Dubbed the 'Forgotten," the list of more than seventy names, along with
the time and place of each death and a brief description of what happened, is
published on the Center's website and identified in a display at the Civil
Rights Memorial Center. SPLC also provided the FBI with information about these
murders. For more about SPLC's civil rights era research and to view the
'Forgotten' list, log on to www.splcenter.org.
Eugene Talmadge (1884-1946)
Born on September 23, 1884 in Forsyth, Georgia, Eugene Talmadge attended the
University of Georgia at Athens (UGA) and taught school before returning to UGA
to earn a law degree (1907). He practiced law in Atlanta before moving to Mt.
Vernon to start his own practice. In 1909, Talmadge married Mattie Thurmond
Peterson; the couple had three children, Margaret, Vera, and Herman Eugene.
After moving to Telfair County, Talmadge made unsuccessful runs for statewide
offices in 1920 and 1922. In 1926, he defeated Agriculture Commissioner J. J.
Brown and was reelected in 1928 and 1930. He used the commission's newspaper,
the Market Bulletin, to advise farmers on ways to improve farming and to
disseminate his political views. His main support came from white farmers and
his right wing views earned him the nickname the "Wild Man from Sugar
Creek."
In attempting to rein in the outspoken and controversial commissioner, the
state senate adopted a committee report charging Talmadge with violating state
law requiring fertilizer fees collected by the department to be deposited in
the state treasury, improperly spending state funds on a scheme to raise the
price of hogs, paying himself and family members more than $40,000 in salaries
and expenses and using department funds to underwrite his annual trips to the
Kentucky Derby. A Georgia house committee recommended that Governor Richard B.
Russell Jr. sue Talmadge to recover state funds spent on the hog-buying scheme.
A minority report called for his impeachment. While the house rejected the call
for impeachment, it agreed to sue Talmadge to recover state funds. The matter
was referred to the state attorney general by Governor Russell, but the
attorney general declined to bring a lawsuit against the popular agriculture
commissioner.
In 1932, Talmadge entered the Democratic Party's gubernatorial primary and won
without a runoff. He promised to balance the state budget, lower utility rates,
reduce the price of automobile tags, and reorganize the state highway board. He
easily won reelection in the 1934. When the legislature refused to lower the
price of automobile tags, Talmadge did so by executive order. He appointed a
new board, when the publicly elected Public Service Commission refused to lower
utility rates. He reorganized the highway board by declaring martial law and
appointing more cooperative members to the board. Talmadge had the state
treasurer and comptroller general physically removed from their offices in the
state capitol, when they refused to cooperate. In 1934, he again declared
martial law and sent in troops to deal with strikers, when a textile strike
broke out. Critics denounced him as a dictator, a demagogue, and a threat to
the tranquility of the state, but his rural supporters that determined the
outcome of statewide elections considered him a friend of the common man and
one of the state's outstanding governors.
Barred by the state constitution from running again after two successive
two-year terms, Talmadge unsuccessfully ran for the US Senate in 1936. Two
years later, he again unsuccessfully ran for the US Senate. In 1940, he won
another gubernatorial bid.
Opposed to black civil rights, Talmadge forced the University System Board of Regents to remove two faculty members, claiming that they were undermining the state's racial status quo. In response, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools voted to withdraw accreditation from the state's white colleges. In 1942, promising to restore accreditation, state attorney general Ellis Arnall ran against and defeated Talmadge in the gubernatorial primary.
During Arnall's term, the state legislature lengthened his term to four years and prohibited a successive term. Talmadge ran for governor and used the US Supreme Court's decision in Smith v. Allwright, which invalidated white primaries, as his main issue. He denounced the courts' actions as a threat to segregation, promised to restore the white primary and to keep blacks in their place in Jim Crow Georgia. While his opponent received the popular vote, Talmage's strong support in rural areas won him the gubernatorial nomination.
In 1954, Stetson Kennedy published, I Rode With the Ku Klux Klan, which revealed how Talmadge used the KKK to stop blacks from voting. The tactics included burning crosses on court-house lawns, tacking "KKK" signs on black churches that warned, "The first nigger who votes in Georgia will be a dead one," sending messages through the mail and dropping others from airplanes over black neighborhoods. On election day, thousands of blacks found miniature coffins on their doorsteps.
The Talmadge Memorial Bridge in Savannah is named
in his honor. Governor-elect Eugene Talmadge died on December 21, 1946, before
taking office. (Sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Talmadge,
www.georgiaencyclopedia.org, and www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk)
Woman of Walton County Revisited
By John Burl Smith
Back in August of 1997, fifty-one years after the lynching of George and Mae
Murray Dorsey and Robert and Dorothy Malcom, his pregnant wife, the Moore's
Ford Memorial Committee began trying to locate their unmarked graves. Rev.
Hosea Williams organized a group from Atlanta in response to their call for
help. My wife, Dot, son, Yohannes and grandson, Trevius and I drove the 60
miles to the Perry Baptist Church in Morgan County to help with the search for
the graves that were marked with only stones.
We arrived a little past noon; people had been coming and going all morning, so
the gathering numbered about 200 when we joined the search. The two couples had
to be buried in Morgan County but even there, whites would not allow the graves
to have markers. Volunteers were cutting and clearing away small trees, vines
and weeds in hopes of finding the stones.
Tables were set on the lawn and lunch was being served as we replaced a group
of volunteers. When we stopped for lunch, the family sat with several elderly
black women, two of which were great grandmothers and one was a great great
grandmother. While we ate lunch, they told us the real story behind the Moore's
Ford lynching. (The DISH v3no44)
They talked about how, "After all the years since slavery ended, little
changed in Walton County." The great great grandmother led the discussion.
"Slavery gave white men in Walton County the attitude that they had a
right to black women and used the claim that a black man posed a threat to
white women to cover up killing him. There were thousands of black women like
Dorothy Malcom all across the South, especially in Alabama, Georgia and
Mississippi. It wasn't just his wife Dorothy that Robert stood up for when he
fought Barney Hester and stabbed him when he tried to go after Dorothy with him
standing there, he stood up for all of us."
Still afraid for their lives and families, these women didn't mine being quoted
but didn't want their names mentioned. Another picked up the story, "There
was a gang of young white boys led by Barney Hester that roamed the county
raping black women and lynching black men who stood up to them." Then
another spoke up, "Families had to send some young girls out of the county
to live with relatives when Hester and his gang got after them. Some women were
so afraid for their men they sent them into the field to keep them alive when
they saw Hester's gang coming."
Neither the sheriff nor the state police did anything to stop the rape and
murders. The story passed to another, "Robert warned Hester to stay away
from his wife. When a woman resisted these rednecks, they beat her up pretty
bad; some died of their wounds. Hester forced himself on Dorothy, who was just
20 when she married Robert and got pregnant. Robert swore he would stop Hester
one way or the other." Another of the elderly women confessed, "We
went to some of the white women we worked for and begged them for help, but
they denied their men would rape blacks."
Last week (6-16-07) the FBI released a report that revealed Georgia's governor
at the time -- Eugene Talmadge -- instigated the lynching to stir up whites
because he was in a tough re-election fight. Moreover, it indicated that J. Edger
Hoover, head of the FBI at the time, covered up the lynching to help Talmadge's
re-election. This 3,725 page report leaves no doubt that there are white
murderers known to the authorities walking free. The state of Georgia has never
investigated these murders. For more on the women of Walton County, see www.thedish.org/Amlet.html#walton.
Email info@mooresford.org for more
about the Moore's Ford Memorial Committee.
H.R. 923
On February 8, 2007, US Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) and 83 co-sponsors introduced H.R. 923: Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act, which establishes an Unsolved Crimes Section in the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice (DOJ) and an Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Investigative Office in the Civil Rights Unit of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). The bill makes the Chief of the Section and the Chief Investigator of the Office responsible for investigating violations of criminal civil rights statutes in which the alleged violation occurred before January 1, 1970 and resulted in death.
"The measure requires: (1) consultation
with state or local officials when there has been a violation of a criminal
civil rights statute that is also a violation of a state or local law; and (2)
referral to the Criminal Section of the Civil Rights Division if the subject of
the complaint has violated a criminal civil rights statute but the violation
does not meet the requirements for the Unsolved Crimes Section."
H.R. 923 amends the Crime Control Act of 1990 to authorize staff of an
Inspector General to assist the National Center for Missing and Exploited
Children by conducting reviews of inactive case files to develop
recommendations for further investigations and engaging in similar activities.
H.R. 923 authorizes the appropriation of $10 million a year over the 2008-2017
period for the Department of Justice (DOJ). The bill also authorizes the
appropriation of $3.5 million annually over this period to provide technical
assistance to state and local law enforcement agencies.
On June 20, 2007, H.R. 923 passed in the House of Representatives. The totals
were 422 Ayes, 2 Nays, 8 Present/Not Voting. An identical bill (S. 535) is
scheduled for debate in the Senate; it is expected to pass. Then, the president
must sign the bill before it becomes the law of the land.
Disgruntled
feels: Denied! Of the
more than seventy (70) names on the Southern Poverty Law Center's
"Forgotten" list, more than thirty (30) of these individuals were
killed by law enforcement officials. While the focus of new legislation is on
resolving old civil rights era murder cases, we cannot help but be aware that
death by police continues to plague black communities across the USA. Rarely is
a police officer indicted and convicted for beating or killing a black person,
even when the act is caught on videotape. Blacks in this country are denied
justice, which is why it is hard to believe the US intends to export abroad to
countries like Iraq and the broader Middle East what it has failed to provide
so many of its own citizens. As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. so eloquently
stated, "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
Disgruntled wants to know: According to
the latest polls, the vast majority of Americans believe the country is headed
in the wrong direction. With an unpopular war and so many other negatives, many
see the Bush administration as the worst in history, surpassing Richard Milhous
Nixon's two terms in office. Every other time that an unpopular administration
ran the nation, there were huge marches and demonstrations. We know these
protests and their demands for change happened because they were broadcast on
the evening news and reported in our local newspapers. With nothing of the sort
being reported now, one wonders are Americans really unhappy about the way the
Bush administration is running the country, or are the media not reporting
these incidences of civil disobedience?
Disgruntled say: An eyewitness, 10-year old Clinton Adams, told FBI agents, that on July 25, 1946, he saw 12 to 15 unmasked white men, whom he recognized, shoot four young African Americans --George and Mae Murray Dorsey and Roger and Dorothy Malcolm-- hundreds of times in broad daylight at the Moore's Ford bridge located on the Oconee and Walton County Georgia line. No one has ever been arrested for these murders. Even though blacks and whites alike have demanded Georgia's attorney general investigate this lynching, no one has ever been prosecuted. On June 11, 2007, after a Monroe County, Georgia Superior Court Judge threw out Genarlow Wilson's 10-year prison sentence for having consensual sex with another teenager, Georgia Attorney General Thurbert Baker appealed the judge's order, thereby keeping Genarlow in prison. Baker has steadfastly refused to open an investigation into the Moore's Ford lynching. Baker, it seems, will move heaven and earth to keep a wrongfully convicted black boy in jail, but he will not lift a finger to bring known white murders before the bar of justice.
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