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Editor’s Note: These remarks were made as part of the Community Remembrance Coalition-Chatham Libations and Memorial Ceremony on Saturday morning at New Hope Baptist Church.
The popular lynching death of Eugene Daniel in 1921 was regrettable and also routine in an America still agitated by the emancipation and migration of former slaves. The very idea that all humans shared the same intelligence and the same soul laid the groundwork for the horror perpetuated by white Americans. Hundreds of years of social and religious conditioning have led white Americans, whether slave owners or not, to believe that they should “fix” blacks and natives. It was, and still is, our national pride and disgrace.
Even when individuals displayed genius, creativity and a high level of skill, the color of their skin excluded them from legal equality under the law throughout the United States. Passage of the 14th Amendment in 1868 gave black men over the age of 21 the right to vote and full citizenship privileges that states could not shorten. But many former Confederate states found ways to maintain control over whites through their social norms which included repression of all black women and men. The question of race was already linked to the thought of “white survival”. In the 1988 publication of “Within the Plantation Household,” author Elizabeth Fox-Genovese states that the domestic subordination of white women was necessary for “the survival and advancement of the white race.” And these women became the arbiter of domestic justice towards their black slaves… who probably disappointed the woman’s expectations… and could be kidnapped or sold with the permission of the master. The hierarchy was clear. Regardless of the church’s teaching on the gospels, white men and women firmly believed that they were doing God’s work by keeping human slaves and “fixing” them to serve white society. .
While the migration of emancipated blacks from the Confederacy to the north has continued, it has been accompanied by terrorism of lynchings and individual murders, and includes 25 racial massacres. Although it was not taught in North Carolina classrooms, we do know that the only coup in America took place in Wilmington in 1898 when a white mob assassinated the elected government of the city and the black community. These racial massacres were possible because of social norms about the superiority of the white race. In the South, Midwest, and North from 1866 to 1985, black people were attacked by mobs for the right to vote, sharecropping, government, business success, and any white woman pointing a finger at a black person. From the destruction of Tulsa’s black business community in 1921, to the 1943 massacre in Detroit where blacks were excluded from housing and work, and the 1985 Philadelphia Police bombing of a group of row houses because some were involved in a black organization, the white mob delivered normal – and sanctioned violence.
This violence is not reflected only in racial lynchings and massacres, but in our national propensity to individualize all minority groups and to assume that white households are always more efficient. We do not stop to consider how white American legislative and social power has crafted laws for 200 years to actively discredit black intelligence and education, impede economic mobility, and stifle family wealth creation. Even today, black unemployment is double the white unemployment rate. No jobs? Or is it white social conditioning that wants to label black people as impaired?
And we are not done with the violence of the crowd. Attend the January 6, 2021 insurgency at the Capitol. Once again a white crowd who, waving the flags of the United States and the defeated Confederacy, claimed that they were the Patriots saving America. The election was surely stolen by black people voting illegally Democrats. It had nothing to do with the crowd’s overt desire to retain American white supremacy and historic privilege in our changing demographic landscape.
Eugene Daniel was the teenage son of a farmer in a black family. And that caused his death.
We have many injustices to rectify, and the work lies before us as we grapple with our own inner dialogues and conditionings passed down from generation to generation. We can do better, and we must, in order to honor the terrified black people who should not have died by a white mob.
Let the reconciliation begin now in Chatham County.
Diana Hales is a member of the Chatham County Council of Commissioners.
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