Both Public and Personal

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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.