“I know now that all people hunger for a noble, unsullied past. ... I know now that that hunger is a retreat from the knotty present into myth and that what ultimately awaits those who retreat into fairy tales, who seek refuge in the mad pursuit to be made great again, in the image of greatness that never was, is tragedy.” — Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of “ We Were Eight Years in Power:An American Tragedy”
There are many reasons to be proud of America: the freedom and rights we enjoy, and the way our heroes rise to the challenges of war when there is no other course, just to cite two examples.
But there are reasons, too, that we should hang our heads in shame: Slavery, pollution and poverty, to name a few.
While it feels good to dwell on our American pride, it’s just as important to remember the dark eras of American history. If we don’t remember, we
delude ourselves with a fictional self-image.
The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which opened last week in Montgomery, Alabama, is dedicated to preserving a dark period of U.S. history. It’s the nation’s first memorial to lynchings. The Equal Justice Initiative, the driving force behind the memorial and the nearby Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration, has recorded more than 4,400 lynchings. It’s likely that there were thousands more. Most lynchings took place in the South, but northern states, including Indiana, were not immune.
A particularly notorious lynching occurred in Marion in 1930, when a mob estimated at 10,000 people took vengeance on two young black men suspected of a murder. The mob dragged the men from jail and strung them up from a tree on the Grant County courthouse grounds.
A third person, 16-year-old James Herbert Cameron Jr., was fitted with a noose, as well. But a couple of people convinced the mob that the black teen was innocent, and he was spared.
Cameron went on to be a local and national leader in the fight against racial injustice. And, while it’s hard to imagine anyone forgiving members of a murderous mob who play judge, jury and executioner, Cameron did just that.
Cameron forgave, but he never forgot.
He dreamed of opening what he called “America's Black Holocaust Museum” to assure that slavery, Jim Crow laws, lynchings and other mistreatment of black Americans would never be whitewashed by revisionist history.
Twelve years after Cameron’s death, the new memorial in Montgomery is shining the light of truth on that dark period of American reality.