It had happened back in the furthest reaches of his memory, 75 years or more before.  He was a little boy of 3 or 4 at the time, now he was nearing his 80^th birthday.  The memory of what he saw lacked certain detail, but one image remained clear, like a photograph in his mind.  He was walking down the street with his mother and two or three other women when he saw something new, something he had never seen before.  Something that he didn’t understand.

“Mama, why is that man hanging from that tree?”

His mother saw it, too.  She wanted to hurry off in another direction before her small son would see it, but it was too late.  One of the other women let out an involuntary gasp, put her hand up to her mouth and whispered, “Oh no!”

“Why’s that man hanging there, Mama?”  He could tell something was wrong.  His mother was visibly upset, and it frightened him.

The boy was from a poor family.  Not as poor as some, at least not yet.  The Great Depression was still a year or two away.  Once the Depression hit, the family would know want.  In the 1920’s, however, his daddy still had a regular job.  But jobs in a small town in West Tennessee didn’t pay very much, not most jobs.  It was “The Roaring Twenties”, but there wasn’t much roaring in this little Southern town.  This was a place where progress progressed much more slowly than in other parts of the country.  It was “The Roaring Twenties”, but nothing much roared in a place where a small, entrenched oligarchy maintained a firm, almost autocratic grip on every aspect of civic life.  Nothing much roared in a place where fewer than 20% of children received a high school diploma.  Nothing much roared where 30% of the population barely received any education at all, or where 30% of the population was confined to less than 10% of residential property.  Nothing much roared in a place where the legal protections we take for granted did not apply to the 30% of the population that were called “nigras” in polite society, or “niggers” in less genteel households.

Between 1865 and 1930, there are 167 known cases of African Americans being lynched in Tennessee.  The true number is almost certainly higher than that, as there are probably some murders that were never included in the official tally.  The incident witnessed by the little boy in this story is not included in the official record.  The man hanging from the tree that day was probably recorded as a victim of suicide.  But everyone knew better.  It didn’t take a lot in those days for a noose to be tied around a man’s neck.  Perhaps this young black man had glared a little too obviously at an attractive white woman as she walked by.  Maybe he had felt cheated by a white storekeeper, or his supervisor at work, and had the audacity to express his contempt publicly.  He might have gotten drunk and cursed at the wrong man as he stumbled down the street.  Maybe he had stolen money from a white man because he could not bear to see his children go hungry. 

Whatever the reason, there was a young, black American man hanging from a tree, and there was a little boy, 3 or 4 years old, who witnessed first hand one of the evil after-effects of America’s original sin.

********************

Shortly before my father passed away at the age of 80, he committed to paper his earliest memories of childhood.  Following his death, as I browsed through a lifetime of odds and ends, including hundreds of letters, and countless notes used during a lifetime of teaching, I came across this collection of memories.  It includes the usual childhood traumas, like when his brother hit him in the nose, or the time his mother gave him a spanking back by the woodshed.  But one of his notations stands out:

“I remember being with my mother and several other women when we saw a black man hanging from a tree limb by a rope – the man had been lynched.”

Despite being raised in the South, first in a small town in West Tennessee, then later in Memphis, where his father tried, unsuccessfully, to find work during the Depression, I never heard my father utter a prejudiced word.  Not once.  He moved away from the state of his birth after he graduated from college.  He was the first member of his family to accomplish that milestone.  When he left Memphis, he left more than a city.  He left a bitter heritage of racial division, distrust, and in some cases even hatred.  Once he left, he never looked back.

I did not know he witnessed a lynching until I found his notes a few months after he died.  I always admired him for his progressive attitude on race.  I never really knew the genesis of his belief in civil rights.  Now, I think I do.  It began one day 80 years ago, when a little boy said to his mother, “Mama, why is that man hanging from that tree?”