Have We Learned Nothing?

Friday, June 24, was the date I’d been eagerly and impatiently awaiting for almost a year. The movie Free State of Jones was released, and I could hardly wait to get to the theater and be among the first to see this exciting story about events in Jones County, Mississippi, during the Civil War. I had a special interest in this film because I’d read the book by the same title, written by academic historian Victoria Bynum, and I knew my great great grandfather, Jasper Collins, played a key role in the events. Jasper was portrayed in the movie by Christopher Berry, whose admiration for his character results in Jasper’s appearing as the intelligent, stable, principled, and godly man he was. The leader of the group, Newton (Newt) Knight, was played by Matthew McConaughay.

Having anticipated the release for so many months, I expected great things, and the movie even exceeded my expectations. It is visually beautiful, masterfully acted, and a powerful contradiction of the Lost Cause myth which dominated the historical record of the Civil War for decades. No noble, genteel planters; no gracious magnolia-scented Southern belles; no smiling, happy slaves. In short, none of the romanticized “Gone with the Wind” version of Southern life and what caused the war. Just the raw truth of greedy rich people who bought, sold, and abused other human beings. And the Civil War was fought to protect their right to do all those things, NOT for states’ rights–unless of course you mean the right of states to continue slavery. And it dispels the idea that the South was one solid block. What took place in Jones County is representative of what happened in communities throughout the South.

The movie also takes viewers beyond the Civil War to emancipation and Reconstruction and the brutality and injustice to which people of color continued to be subjected in our country. At the end of my second viewing, I looked at my friend who had watched it with me, we shook our heads sadly, and I asked “What has changed?” We as a country like to believe we’ve conquered our racial prejudice, but I think you’d have to live with a bag over your head to really believe these problems are in the past. There’s simply too much evidence surrounding us every day to allow us the luxury of denying our racist attitudes.

Exhibit One: At least two of the films previewed before our movie began are about the same subject. And then just two days after Free State’s opening, Jesse Williams made his now-viral speech, in which he passionately declared:

Yesterday would have been young Tamir Rice’s 14th birthday so I don’t want to hear anymore about how far we’ve come when paid public servants can pull a drive-by on 12-year-old playing alone in the park in broad daylight, killing him on television and then going home to make a sandwich. Tell Rekia Boyd how it’s so much better than it is to live in 2012 than it is to live in 1612 or 1712. Tell that to Eric Garner. Tell that to Sandra Bland. Tell that to Dorian Hunt. . . . There has been no war that we have not fought and died on the front lines of. There has been no job we haven’t done. There is no tax they haven’t leveed against us – and we’ve paid all of them. But freedom is somehow always conditional here. ‘You’re free,’ they keep telling us. But she would have been alive if she hadn’t acted so… free.

Now, freedom is always coming in the hereafter, but you know what, though, the hereafter is a hustle. We want it now.

That last line is strongly reminiscent of Martin Luther King’s words in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”:

We have waited for more than 340 years [this was written in 1963] for our constitutional and God given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse and buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, ‘Wait.’ But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; . . . when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading ‘white’ and ‘colored’; when your first name becomes ‘nigger,’ your middle name becomes ‘boy’ (however old you are) and your last name becomes ‘John,’ and your wife and mother are never given the respected title ‘Mrs.’; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of ‘nobodiness’–then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience.

Dr. King wrote these words in 1963, 100 years after the slaves were “emancipated” and 98 years after the 13^th Amendment was added to our Constitution. One would think a whole century would be enough to change the attitudes of the privileged class, but now another half century has passed, and we still haven’t gotten it right. Why, 150 years after “emancipation,” is Jesse Williams still compelled to speak the damning words he delivered at the 2016 BET awards? Why, 150 years after “emancipation,” are my inter-racial couple friends still hesitant to hold hands in public? Why, 150 years after “emancipation,” does my dear long-time black friend tell me he knows where not to stop when he drives through certain Southern states?

Why, 150 years after “emancipation,” do black mothers live in fear of their sons being shot and killed? White mothers don’t live with that same fear; so why, 150 years after “emancipation,” is there still such a difference—such a gulf between the experiences of white families and black families? And how on earth, 150 years after “emancipation,” can it be that an openly racist man—whose ignorant and hateful words have given permission to his supporters to unleash their own repressed racism—won the nomination of one of our major political parties to serve as leader of the free world?

We’re long past due for some honest soul searching! It’s past time for us to drop the blinders and the denial and admit we haven’t learned a damned thing, and then it’s time for us to do something about our stubbornness, indifference, and hatred. We need to be better. We need to leave a better world for all of our children and our grandchildren. As Newt Knight says in Free State of Jones, we need to act “for our children, and their children, and their children’s children.” And we need to do it now.