Entrance gate at Auschwitz concentration camp, June 2005 by Muu-karhu. Source: Wikimedia Commons via (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Reflecting on Darkness

Lynching; Americans and the Holocaust

05.25.18

On this week’s episode, Nathan, Brian, Joanne & Ed talk about how Americans remember and reckon with systematic violence, and how we keep this difficult history alive and in the public eye. Historian Kidada Williams reads letters from a man seeking justice for his son who was lynched, and Brian visits an exhibit at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C.

atrocities; historical memory; racial violence

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Respectfully Yours, Gainer Atkins

Historian Kidada Williams studies lynching. For years, she read accounts of lynching in newspapers and public documents. But how she thought about lynching victims changed when she discovered letters written by a man named Gainer Atkins. Atkins wrote the NAACP seeking justice for his son, Charlie, who was murdered by a mob in Davisboro, Georgia.

Read some of the correspondence between Gainer Atkins and Walter White (provided by Kidada Williams).

Music:

Delican’t by Podington Bear
The Things We Save by Podington Bear

National Memorial for Peace and Justice; lynching; racial violence

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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NATHAN: Thanks for downloading this episode of BackStory. If you like what you hear, there’s much more at backstoryradio.org.

BRIAN: Major funding for BackStory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the University of Virginia, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.

JOANNE: From Virginia humanities, this is BackStory.

ED: Welcome to BackStory, the show that explains the history behind today’s headlines. I’m Ed Ayers.

BRIAN: I’m Brian Balogh.

JOANNE: I’m Joanne Freeman.

NATHAN: And I’m Nathan Connolly.

BRIAN: If you’re new to the podcast, we’re all historians. And each week, we explore the history of a topic that’s been in the news.

JOANNE: Last month, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice opened in Montgomery, Alabama. The memorial is dedicated to the thousands of African-Americans who were lynched between 1877 and 1950. At the center of the museum is a walkway with 800 steel columns, each inscribed with the name of an American county and who was lynched there. The columns hang from the ceiling, reminding visitors of bodies strung up in trees.

NATHAN: Today on the show, we’re going to talk about how we, as Americans, remember and reckon with systematic violence. How do we keep this difficult history alive and in the public eye? Later, we’ll take a trip to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, to hear about how Americans reacted to the Holocaust.

ED: But first, we’re going to hear from historian Kidada Williams. She studies racial violence targeting African-Americans, including the wave of lynching that began the aftermath of the Civil War. Over the course of her research, she’s come across many accounts of lynchings. Now these were not secret crimes. Often accounts of lynching would be published not only in local papers but in national outlets like the New York Times. And while these accounts can give details on what happened the day of the lynching, they are not usually sympathetic to the victim.

MALE SPEAKER: Davisboro, Georgia, May 18th. Charles Atkins, a Negro, 15 years old, one of four taken into custody today in connection with the killing of Mrs. Elizabeth Kitchens, 20 years old, was burned at the stake tonight. The lynching occurred at the scene of the murder and followed an alleged confession from the 15-year-old prisoner. He was tortured over a slow fire for 15 minutes and then, shrieking with pain, was questioned concerning his accomplices. Members of the mob, comprising nearly 2,000 people, then raised the body again, fastened it to a pine tree with trace chains, and relighted the fire. More than 200 shots were fired into the charred body, following the boy’s death.

Looking in the archives of the NAACP, Williams came across some extraordinary documents concerning this lynching– letters from the family of Charlie Atkins, letters which tell a very different story of his death and of its aftermath.

KIDADA WILLIAMS: My Dear Mr. White, this is knowledge and say that I received your very much appreciated letter and wish to say hear the purpose of my writing you was–

“GAINER ATKINS”: I am looking around for a good lawyer to bring suit against the state of Georgia for the lynching of my son at the age of 13 years old on the 1922, 18th day of May. And I’m sending to you for information– the fact the crowd tied a rope around my neck and also tied me to a stump, would beat my wife almost to death. She has not been well from that time, and they kept me in jail for 21 months and my wife in jail for seven months. I’m now looking forward to bringing the matter to the state court, just as soon as possible or as soon as I can get some good lawyer to take the case up.

I’m getting old. I miss the support of my family and feel that the state should help me to bury this burden. Thanking you for what you has done for me and what you are going to do. I wish to have a favorable answer soon. Respectfully yours, Gainer Atkins.

KIDADA WILLIAMS: When African-Americans wrote the Department of Justice or when they wrote the President of the United States, they often got a form letter back saying, This is an issue that should be taken up with your state government. What’s curious is that a number of African-Americans get that form letter and they actually write back and say, I went to my state government first, and they did nothing.

You could also imagine him potentially writing to the local newspapers, but that would be less likely to occur because newspapers, especially the local ones where lynchings occurred, assume the guilt of the person who’s been lynched and don’t really press down on the fact that even if they had committed the crime, that they were still entitled to due process and equal protection under the law. They take the story that the mob crafts to justify the killings. And so if he writes out that could be seen as a direct act of defiance.

And there’s nothing to stop the newspaper from publishing the letter, including his address where he is and putting a bull’s eye on his back. The NAACP has, up to this point, positioned itself as an ally. They’re going to investigate lynchings themselves. They’re trying to get the family story out about the killings. He’s writing to the NAACP because he’s hoping that they can help him get justice for himself and for his son.

NATHAN: July, 16th, 1926, 209 Taylor Street, Camden, New Jersey.

“GAINER ATKINS”: Dear Sirs, I wrote you some time ago concerning what happened to me. Now, I will tell you the facts in this case to the very best of my knowledge. In May 1922 in Washington County, state of Georgia my boy was lynched for killing a white woman that was carrying US mail to Davisboro Georgia. My boy was 13 years old at the time. His name was Charlie Atkins. He was lynched without any investigation by the people of Washington and Johnson Counties. And myself and my wife was beat near to death because it was said that my boy did the killing.

And it was said shortly after this happened that a white man killed the woman and gave my boy her auto to make it appear that my boy did the killings since my boy knew no better than to let this man give him this auto. Now this is all for this time. Please let me hear from you by return mail, as I would very much like to hear from you as quick as possible. Yours truly, Gainer Atkins.

KIDADA WILLIAMS: Both of the letters are written longhand. The handwriting is actually very neat, probably doesn’t have the fine literacy skills that some of our listeners might enjoy today. But even without that, you still get a sense of who he was as a person, and I can imagine him as a grieving father who’s been beaten, who’s been in prison, who’s left his home community in order to be safe, trying to do something to try to have meaning in his life by giving a degree of justice for himself and his son.

And so that I feel on the page when I interact with the letter. On July 26, 1926, Walter White, Assistant Secretary from the NAACP, wrote Gainer Atkins back. My Dear Mr. Atkins, I have your letter of the 16th relative to the lynching of your son. I am taking the matter up with well-informed people in Georgia. I will keep you advised of all developments. Yours very truly, Walter White. I don’t believe I have his initial response.

Gainer’s letters referred to earlier correspondence with Walter White and receiving information from him. For the letter that I shared with you all, there’s only a little bit that I just read. But what often happens with the first response, it is an expression of condolence, a hope to do what they can to help the family get justice if that is at all possible.

Now the challenge is that, in the 1920s, the NAACP– they were running out of fuel. They hadn’t been able to get federal anti-lynching legislation passed, and they’re also beginning the slow process of trying to branch out beyond lynching, and take up segregation, and education, and other places of public accommodations. So part of what they’re able to do, at this point, is to try to apply some pressure to the governor– to try to shame the state into taking some action. Because that’s their only recourse at this point.

I don’t think that people like Gainer Atkins know that that’s the situation, the internal situation, of NAACP at this point. All he knows is that they’ve thrown him a lifeline. With the lynching victims’ families, they feel as though they don’t have anything else to lose but to ask, and ask, and ask, and ask, and ask for more– something to get them closer.

On September 7th, 1926, Gainer Atkins wrote another letter to Walter White. I wrote Mr. Alexander concerning the case–

“GAINER ATKINS”: –as you directed me to do. But I did not get very much satisfaction out of his letter, so I thought I would write to you again to see if you would write the High Sheriff of Washtenaw County, Georgia and also my lawyer, whose address is Sandersville, Georgia, Washington County. See if you can get any information from them concerning this case.

I’m getting older now and feels the need of my child and also the time that these people cause me to lose and suffer. So I want to ask you to do all that you can for me. In good many ways, this burdens my heart. So do all you can for me. The loss of my child is worse than all this. I wants to consult the government concerning the matter, and I wants to ask you to direct me as to just how to get at the matter.

My lawyer, Mr. Evans, is the man that cleared myself and my wife of this crime, but my child is gone. He suffered death. My wife suffered for a long time also– and also myself, so answer soon. Respectfully yours, Gainer Atkins.

KIDADA WILLIAMS: What stands out in the letter is Gainer Atkins’s palpable grief and agony at losing his boy. It’s obvious that he’s deeply affected by the killing, and his beating, and his imprisonment. And I think that, for me, what the letter does, it connects Charles, or Charlie as his family called him, to community. It says that, even though he was isolated from his people at the time of his death, that he was fully human, that he was part of a family that grieved his death long after it occurred. And for me, I think that that’s really important because it shows a very different side of lynching that we don’t get when we look at the newspapers.

And if I can, I’ll also connect that to part of what we’re seeing with the new legacy museum down in Montgomery. One of the things that they’ve been able to do is to do something historians haven’t done, which is connect directly to families. In their publications, and the documentaries that they’re working on, and even in the museum itself, they are bringing the story of lynching victims’ families, lynching victims’ connectedness to communities to light.

It’s letters like Gainer’s that, at least for me, cause the course correction in the nature of my research. The writing that I did on lynching was distant and personal. It was discovering Gainer’s letter that changed that. Because I now saw Charlie. I had to ground them. I had to ground those victims, connect those victims to their people. Because that’s how they were in life, as letters like Gainer’s really reveals to me.

ED: Kidada Williams is a historian at Wayne State University and author of They Left Great Marks on Me– African-American Testimonies of Racial Violence from Emancipation to World War I.

Both Public and Personal

Ed, Joanne, Nathan, and Brian discuss the emotional impact of Atkins’s letter and consider the new National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama.

Music:

Retake by Ketsa

National Memorial for Peace and Justice; news media; racial violence

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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FEMALE SPEAKER: This is not a drink. This is the new Cascara Cold Foam Cold Brew, Kraft liquefied, delicately smooth. This is the Strawberry Acai Starbucks Refreshers Beverage– tropics, chilled, my afternoon anew. This is the Teavana Iced Peach White Tea Infusion– steeped, shaken, excited to refresh. This is the new Ultra Caramel Frappuccino Blended Beverage– whipped cream layers, perfect. And this is your afternoon made at Starbucks.

BRIAN: When I listen to that series of letters, what struck me in an overwhelming fashion is a kind of desperate need for closure on the part of the parents of this young man who was lynched. And I think it’s fair to extrapolate from the very personal, which is so moving, to, really, a social need for both exposure and closure on this terrible tragedy that is just ingrained in American history. I’d be curious to know what you folks think.

ED: What’s so striking about this is these names have been hidden in full sight ever since they happened. This is not some secretive crime. Names were published in the newspapers at the time and often championed. So it’s an unusual kind of crime in so many ways. One, in the sense that it was brazenly conducted in public and documented at the time, which is how we can actually have these histories that people are writing. So it’s even more appalling that this was not something done in the dark of night, but this was something that was done in the full glare of publicity.

BRIAN: And yet his parents couldn’t even write to the local newspaper for fear of, well, bringing more of that kind of violent attention to themselves again.

ED: Yeah, it kind of put them at even greater risk that all of this was public. They suffered from the publicity and were not able to benefit from the public nature of the crime.

NATHAN: There is a way in which the Atkins family– what jumps out to me, anyway, is this question of time. It’s time passing before they get answers to the letters. There’s time in the lifetimes of the two parents, and they really want a sense of justice. The multiple references, for instance, where the father’s talking about him and the mother getting on in years, that they want to see justice done in the span of their lifetimes.

And it really, I think, puts a whole different spin on what it means to have justice. I mean, we like to think, in our profession, in terms of decades or in terms of centuries and the way that history unfold. But for many people who are seeking redress, they don’t have that kind of time to wait.

JOANNE: What strikes me, though, when we talk about justice, that can have so many meanings. There’s obviously the legal meaning, but, what strikes me is that when people are looking for a sense of justice for a family member or a community member who’s been a victim of this kind of crime, they already, unfortunately, have to own that experience. And isn’t part of what they’re asking for is for the community and, in a sense, the nation to own it, too? I mean, isn’t that part of what maybe would be included with injustice?

NATHAN: Well, I think it’s absolutely true that there– it’s very slow in coming that people as a nation or as a people take responsibility for or acknowledge things that are negative. I mean, we’re really happy to support anything that remembers World War II and the victory there or even the victory of the Civil War in some vague sense. But I think to try to acknowledge a national debt to a population that suffered political violence, as the museum in Montgomery tries to do– the Peace and Justice Museum– they’re set up by the Equal Justice Initiative. Like, that is a very difficult place to travel to as an American and just sit with.

ED: Ironically, the very dispersion, the ubiquity of this terrible violence across the South and, actually, across much of the North and Midwest as well, makes it harder to memorialize. You can’t go to a single place to see where something terrible happened. The very fact that it was spread over an area the size of continental Europe makes the new museum in Montgomery all the more essential. We need to gather it to see how something that took place over so many decades, over generations, and over vast landscape can actually be seen.

ED: Well, what really strikes me about the museum, which is a remarkable national effort to attract people and bring attention to this neglected topic, we’re moving now from the national, but we’re doing it by almost funneling visitors into the intensely personal, with the names of those people who were lynched quite literally carved into stone. And not only is the museum in Montgomery giving us an overview of the actual individuals who were lynched, but they are also gathering soil from the very places where these horrific crimes took place to literally ground our memories in places.

I’m proud that my daughter and her husband– our film company that have made a film called An Outrage– and they traveled all across the South from Virginia to Texas to talk with people who were keeping alive the memories of these crimes in the places where they happened. A lot of times there’s no sign or any other marker of these lynchings. But Hannah and Lance are visiting the people who are going to the courthouses, going to the newspapers and oral history, and determine that people not forget the things that happened right beneath their feet.

JOANNE: And you know, it strikes me that the link between what you’re talking about, Ed, and the letters that we were talking about earlier– and actually, Nathan’s earlier point about how it’s hard to travel down that road to ownership of these kinds of events in the past is that the way to do that, just as you’re suggesting Ed, is to ground it in its humanity, which the letters do so powerfully and in the materiality of it– the soil. Even just the monuments hanging down that are sort of echoing the idea of a lynching– that when you get the ugliness, and the emotion, and the feeling, and the humanity, and the sort of essence of an event– that’s such a powerful way of making these difficult-to-grapple with events real and, on a human level, it at least encourages you to begin to grapple with it.

Americans & the Holocaust

How much did Americans know about the persecution and murder of jews in Europe in the 1930s and 40s? Brian tours an exhibit at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. with curator Daniel Greene.

Music:

Lens Flare by Podington Bear

Holocaust; U.S. Holocaust Museum; antisemitism

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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JOANNE: Anti-Semitism is on the rise in America. 2017 saw the largest increase in anti-Semitic incidents on record. More and more fascists and neo-nazis parade their violent ideology, as we saw last summer here in Charlottesville.

NATHAN: In Europe, many sites of the Holocaust have been turned into museums, and we often hear the phrase “never again,” associated with remembering the genocide. But in the United States, the history is starting to get a bit hazy. Americans, in recent years, have taken to reopening old debates about how many Jews were killed in Nazi concentration camps. And many have forgotten the name Auschwitz altogether.

BRIAN: But there is some good news. While basic details are receding from memory, 96% of Americans believe that the Holocaust occurred, and 93% believe that all students should learn it in school. Educating the public about the genocide and its relevance to today is the mission of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. The museum has a new exhibition. Americans and the Holocaust, which explores the reaction of the US public to the persecution and murder of Jews in Europe in the 1930s and ’40s.

I recently took a trip to DC with one of our producers to check it out. We arrived on a Friday morning, and I was pleased to see just how many people were there.

FEMALE SPEAKER: Thank you.

BRIAN: Hi, I’m Brian Balogh.

MALE SPEAKER: Hi, Danny Green, great to meet you.

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

FEMALE SPEAKER: –nice to meet you.

MALE SPEAKER: Nice to meet you, too.

FEMALE SPEAKER: Thank you so much

MALE SPEAKER: Thanks for coming.

BRIAN: Our guide for the day was curator Daniel Green.

DANIEL GREEN: Come on in this way, because it will give you a sense of where we want people to be at the beginning of the exhibition. You hear it a lot louder in the gallery, but we’re trying to attract people down the hall.

BRIAN: We walked up to a video screen showing a series of photographs and newsreels from the 1930s– people standing in breadlines, a lynching– Green says that these images put America in its historical context.

DANIEL GREEN: We see xenophobia, racism, violence, anti-Semitism in the United States, and we see the economy fall apart and Americans hungry and looking for jobs. Those insecurities and those fears are going to shape our response to Nazism, almost all the way along.

BRIAN: What do you expect people will be most surprised to learn from this exhibit?

DANIEL GREEN: I think they’ll be surprised to learn how much detailed information Americans had about the persecution and murder of Jews in Europe in real time.

BRIAN: The first part of the exhibit focuses on how the American media covered Nazi Germany in small towns in large cities across the United States.

DANIEL GREEN: Here, what you’re seeing on these magazines our coverage of Nazism in Time Magazine, Vanity Fair. Americans are very interested in Hitler as a new world leader. And anti-Semitism is not hidden. Joseph Goebbels on the cover of Time magazine July 10th, 1933, the tagline is, “Say it in your dreams. The Jews are to blame.”

MALE REPORTER (VINTAGE RECORDING): –as brutally as it did five years ago, is Goebbels’ persecution of the Jews. Sign posts, the city limits bear the legend, Jews not wanted. Jews keep out.

DANIEL GREEN: You see anti-Semitism in Germany. Americans going to the theaters could have seen this. In this theater, you’ll see Father Coughlin ranting against what he called Jewish communism and says, pledge with me to restore America to the Americans, elected representatives blaming America’s unemployment problem on immigration. And if only we shut down immigration, we wouldn’t have unemployment problems. So the themes are resonant today.

BRIAN: In November of 1938, Americans were immersed in coverage of Kristallnacht. Jewish-owned homes, businesses, and synagogues were vandalized en masse in territories controlled by Germany.

MALE REPORTER (VINTAGE RECORDING): President Roosevelt, in a statement without precedent, speaks out against the persecution of minorities in Germany. He says he could scarcely believe such things could occur. Acting on presidential instruction, Secretary of State–

BRIAN: The American press reports Kristallnacht as a nationwide terror attack by a government against its own citizens. And you see the banner headlines, we show how the president, Roosevelt, responds to Kristallnacht. We show how Congress responds to Kristallnacht with the idea of a child refugee bill that can’t make its way out of committee onto the floor for a vote. And we focus on these two polls in two weeks after Kristallnacht, one which shows that 94% of Americans disapprove of the treatment of Jews by the Nazis. And then, they’re asked whether we should have let in more Jewish exiles in that same week at the end of November. And more than 7 out of 10 say no.

MALE SPEAKER (VINTAGE RECORDING): This rise of intolerance in Germany today, the suffering being inflicted on an innocent and helpless people, grieve every–

DANIEL GREEN: We want visitors to ask hard questions as they come through this exhibition. A hard question is, why is there a gap between disapproval of atrocities abroad and a will to action on behalf of the victims.

BRIAN: I can see from where we’re standing in a series of public opinion poll questions. I hope the answers are on the back.

DANIEL GREEN: They are.

BRIAN: And it looks like they’re intended to guide us through this exhibit.

DANIEL GREEN: Right, and we decided early on that we wanted this to be Americans and the Holocaust, not the US government and the Holocaust. And so we thought, how do we get to what all Americans were thinking about. And the science of polling is imperfect. And it’s even less perfect in the ’30s and ’40s than it is now. But you see these major trends of isolationism, of fear of another depression, of reluctance to let in exiles, desire not to go to war consistently in all of these polls. And we hope that visitors who come through will say, oh, this is what was on American’s minds.

CHARLES LINDBERGH (RECORDING): The danger of the Roosevelt administration lies in its subterfuge. While its members have promised us peace, they have lead us to war, heedless of the platform upon which they were elected.

DANIEL GREEN: And here we show the America First Committee– the anti-war movement founded in 1940. Charles Lindbergh becomes the most popular spokesman of this. When he goes to Nazi Germany in October 1938, he’s awarded the service cross of the German eagle. This is the service cross that he was awarded– that Hermann Goering handed to him.

CHARLES LINDBERGH (RECORDING): If any of these groups– the British, the Jewish, or the administration– stops agitating for war, I believe there will be little danger of our involvement.

DANIEL GREEN: We focus on this infamous speech he gives in Des Moines on September 11th, 1941, where he caused the Jews war agitators and he threatens them. He says their status in America will not be as secure if we go to war to fight Nazism.

MALE SPEAKER (VINTAGE RECORDING): December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamy.

BRIAN: The United States does enter the war after the bombing of Pearl Harbor by Japan. And although many Americans were horrified by the treatment of Jews in Germany, America’s response to Pearl Harbor was to round up our own citizens with Japanese ancestry into what are called, at the time, concentration camps.

DANIEL GREEN: The contrast of these two magazines was really interesting to me. This is The Crisis. This is the NAACP’s magazine. The article is, “Americans in Concentration Camps,” September, 1942. And they say color seems to be the only reason why thousands of American citizens of Japanese ancestry are in concentration camps. In contrast, Life Magazine is writing about Manzanar, which they call “a scenic spot of lonely loveliness, where Japs are settled comfortably.”

BRIAN: The headline says, “Mountain Camp.”

DANIEL GREEN: Right, right. And Americans are for– and this poll was asking whether we’re doing the right thing rounding up Japanese aliens and removing them from the Pacific Coast, and 93% of Americans say yes. The question is asked about aliens, not about citizens, even though 2/3 of the Japanese-Americans were rounded up are citizens.

Also in America in 1942, Americans learn about what the Nazis called the “final solution,” the plan to murder all the Jews of Europe. And we asked in this last section of the exhibition within the context of war, which is the story, what do we do about the fact that we know this? There were no American reporters on the ground. So very often the tone of those articles is, we’ve been told that. It’s been said that two million Jews have been murdered.

But we don’t see, for the most part– there are a few Soviet photos that leak out– evidence of the atrocities that we think about today when we think about the Holocaust until after mass murder is over. It’s April and May of ’45. One of the things that I think about is, as Americans are going to the newsreels in April of ’45 to watch this newsreel Nazi murder mills, it’s also the moment that the president has died– the president for 12 years. As this information is leaking out, we’re celebrating the defeat of Nazism.

BRIAN: There’s a lot going on.

DANIEL GREEN: There’s a lot going on.

BRIAN: What would you like people to take away from this exhibit?

DANIEL GREEN: We want people to think about their roles and responsibilities as citizens in a democracy. One way to look at this exhibition is, what do we do when a democracy falls apart? What’s our responsibility to refugees? When should we enter a war that a lot of Americans consider a foreign war? When we learn that a population abroad is targeted for murder, what should we do about it?

I think you often see Americans blamed for not knowing history, sometimes made fun of on late-night programs right for not knowing history. But it’s our job to teach them this history. The challenge of putting together an exhibition and the challenge of public history is it’s the same content, but it’s got to mean something to an eighth grader and an 80-year-old who lived through it. If visitors, especially high school and college students, can understand that these questions also have a history in America, for us, that would be a great outcome.

BRIAN: Daniel Green is a historian at Northwestern University and curator of Americans in the Holocaust, an exhibit at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. Joanne, Nathan, Ed. I just want to underscore what Danny Green believed to be the purpose of this whole exhibit– is for people who visited to do something with the information that they encounter. But what is it that they should do?

Memory and Memorials

The hosts explore what visitors should take away from memorials to institutionalized violence.

collective memory; memorialization; public history

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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NATHAN: Well, I mean, there are a variety of ways in which people will respond, regardless of whether or not we agree with that response. And you may remember, from 2014, there was an episode in Auschwitz, which was a Nazi concentration camp, that was converted into a memorial site. And this American teenager took a selfie, and she did so with a smile on her face and put it on social media. And there was immediate backlash about that. And she’s developing a personal connection with a historic site, but there’s a sense that the tone is wrong.

And you can certainly imagine this being similarly a problem if one were to, say, go to the Peace and Justice Memorial for the Equal Justice Initiative and replicate, in effect, the visual grammar of the lynching photograph by taking a selfie in front of one of these installations. And so I think, on one level, people need to go– that that’s partly their civic responsibility. But then there also has to be another element of that, which is getting up to speed on what the story is, us having a robust conversation, be it in public spaces, in social media elsewhere, really framing the event and framing the move to memorialize these various episodes.

And the Holocaust is obviously an easier one to do in some cases, not in all cases, but in some cases, simply because of the way that America stands outside of that particular atrocity. And so we should also be aware of that, I think, and use the moment of remembering the Holocaust as a way to cast an even broader universal dilemma about what powerful people do relative to the disempowered.

BRIAN: But Nathan, just to push back a little bit, is it easier to do when, today, as we speak, the United States is denying asylum to thousands of people who, while not facing concentration camps, are facing systematic violence and all other kinds of terror at the hands of the countries that they live in?

NATHAN: Yeah, I think the best public history work does exactly that. It offers these reminders of the way that history rhymes and tries to encourage people to think about things that they might find abhorrent in the past being replicated or reproduced in some aspect in the present. So I think we should not think about us as somehow, again, standing outside of a very human condition of dealing with refugees, or those in crisis, or, again, a certain kind of political violence, but instead use the moment to memorialize the Holocaust or memorialize lynching as ways to point to, say, the Syrian refugee crisis or police brutality, or any number of other issues that would be resonant with the themes that those other earlier events really do conjure.

ED: You know, it’s one thing that I think is appealing to people about the Holocaust Museum is that it seems, in American terms, nonpartisan. I’m having lots of conversations about slavery and the Civil War, however. And it’s interesting how people can project partisan identities back onto something 150 years ago. So Brian, your question about the current events of the Syrian refugee crisis and so forth, ironically, the thing that’s dangerous– you can confront people with atrocity, but don’t try to make it look like it’s about today.

BRIAN: Correct.

ED: So it raises the question. We’re supposed to do something with this information. But to what extent is going to the museum and confronting these atrocities, which is never a comfortable thing– is that, in itself, an act?

JOANNE: Well, you know, the challenge of these kinds of sites is the different things that people bring to them. So at some point in the past, I went to Dachau. And as a Jew, that was incredibly painful. And I felt like I had to do it, and I did it. But I brought with me everything that I had been taught and everything that my family sort of felt about and had experienced involving the Holocaust.

Now that’s something very different from the person who is being introduced to it for the first time and takes a selfie. That person is bringing– I was going to say no baggage, but just different baggage, right? So bringing yourself there is important, but that’s the complexity and the challenge of these sites is that there’s such a spectrum of kinds of people that they need to communicate with.

NATHAN: So I will say that there is absolutely a need to bring oneself there and a need to recognize that we don’t come unencumbered, anyone of us, to these sites. But I think it’s also that being in these places and standing as a part of the landscape, whether you’re talking about the sites that are in Europe marking the Holocaust or sites on the West Coast of Africa marking slavery, lynching sites in the US. It also takes a lot of work for those sites to be built.

And we have to acknowledge that they’re just as constructed and just as contested as any place else and that there are all kinds of unmarked places, where similarly important historical happenings and human events occurred. And so, in some ways, it’s about reading both the landscape that seems invisible but also recognizing the one that gets built for us as part of our inheritance.

BRIAN: That’s going to do it for us today. But you can keep the conversation going online. Let us know what you thought of the episode or ask us your questions about history.

ED: You’ll find us at backstoryradio.org, or send an email to backstory@virginia.edu. We’re also on Facebook and Twitter– @BackStoryRadio. Whatever you do, don’t be a stranger.

NATHAN: This episode of BackStory was produced by David Stenhouse, Nina Ernest, Emily Gadek, and Ramona Martinez. Jamal Milner is our technical director. Diana Williams is our digital editor. And Joey Thompson is our researcher. Additional help came from Angeli Bishosh, Sequoia Carrilo, Courtney Spania, Aaron Teiling, Corean Thomas, and Gabriel Hunter Chang. Our theme song was written by Nick Thorburn. Other music in this episode came from Ketsa, Podington Bear, and Jahzzar. Special thanks to the Johns Hopkins Studio in Baltimore.

JOANNE: BackStory is produced at Virginia Humanities. Major support is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the provost office at the University of Virginia, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations. Additional support is provided by the Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities, and the environment.

MALE SPEAKER: Brian Balogh is Professor of history at the University of Virginia. Ed Ayers is Professor of the Humanities and President Emeritus of the University of Richmond. Joanne Freeman is Professor of History and American studies at Yale University. Nathan Connolly is the Herbert Baxter Adams Associate Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University. BackStory was created by Andrew Windham for Virginia Humanities.