“I could look at
this for a while and it would put me in a very dark place” – from an outside
observer in the library.
This is a
painting from Jacob Lawrence’s series titled The Great Migration that covers the Great Migration and the reasons
African Americans had to leave the South in such numbers. This particularly
painting powerfully illustrates one of the most potent reasons to leave the
South: the constant threat of unpunished racial violence. Lawrence’s imagery
here is absolutely breathtaking – the twisted rope, bare ground, and sorrowful
figure all bring to mind images we’ve seen of lynchings, the very same images
that might have been put on postcards in the South to show the world “how we do
things down here”. In this context, the Great Migration seems less like an
economic or political choice and more like a collective act of survival.
As a white
southerner, this is a legacy that I feel the region as a whole needs to deal
with more directly. As said in class today, the pure barbarity of the acts
meted out by whites to protect their own position at the top of the
socio-economic hierarchy is always intensely surprising and disturbing. The
rope is a misnomer of sorts: as Hellhounds
so graphically pointed out, a lynching was rarely just a hanging and much more
often a systematic drawn execution by torturous ordeal that would make a
medieval executioner uncomfortable. It is important to face the reality of the
kinds of crime that were carried out by whites and address the fact that many
who are still alive will never face any kind of justice for their actions. To
me, this painting is emblematic of that lack of justice. It is very possible and
factually correct to blame the entire country for the systematic discrimination
that African Americans face, but in my mind the South absolutely deserves the
reputation of being the most backwards part of the country – up until very
recently it was basically medieval.
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