Nearly 2,000 black people were lynched during the reconstruction,and the lynchings continued up into the 40’s when I was in high school. The black students who came to Berkeley High School when their parents came north to work in the Kaiser shipyards brought with them stories that they never told their white classmates. They were in a new world where they shared seats with white kids, and no one threatened to end their lives. The lynching were raw, hangings, dousing with gasoline and set afire, dragged behind trucks until they were dead. And the perpetrators were immune from prosecution. It is a history of violence, death, strangulation and burnings equivalent only to the ancient inquisition. But it had no religious aspect; only a hatred of black faces and a belief that blacks were beasts of burden.worth less than a dog or a mule.
I ran on the track team with black kids, sat in class with them, children of people who had come north and west to work in the wartime shipyards. I had no idea what they had gone through in Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana. Those things were not taught nor discussed where we lived in 1952. We have a national legacy of violence and racism that will not go away. It is part of who we are as a nation. William Faulkner wrote in 1948 that unless we conquer the division that throttles America we will lose America. It is something that could be an editorial in today’s newspaper. John Steinbeck repeated Faulkner’s warning in 1968, having seen ugliness in New Orleans during his epic journey with his dog Charley. Both books (Intruder in the Dust and Travels with Charley) bear reading again.
Russell Hill 