Opinion

OPINION: Remembering the Sin and Shame of Lynching in America

Published

9 years ago

June 26, 2017

The lynching rope is part of the altar for Omnira Institute’s ‘Ritual of Remembrance’ Juneteenth celebration on June 10 at Lake Merritt.

“Where there’s a will, there’s a way,” the old folks used to say when facing obstacles, often under their breaths.

“Where there’s a tree, there’s a rope,” is the next line, almost a rejoinder, acknowledging the constancy of unpredictable trouble, an expression fraught with grief, fear and loss.

One that a Black child born in the North in the 1950s didn’t know referred to the South’s “Strange Fruit.”

I am not sure if you can see it, the rope, on the altar, honoring and remembering the victims of white supremacy, lynched individually or in pairs or groups, these descendants of enslaved people whose only (proven) crime was to be Black. They were all killed by “person or persons unknown,” yet for decades after the Emancipation Proclamation, lynchings were very public events often occurring on the courthouse lawn.

Town newspapers sometimes announced the day and time the spectacle would take place and trains were specially scheduled to transport the spectators: men, women, and even small children. Newspapers covered lynchings in graphic detail. Photographs showed desecrated bodies of Black people surrounded by triumphant sometimes even grinning white spectators. Again, “the persons unknown.” Black people certainly knew who terrorized them. The memory of such horrors haunted Black communities, a hobbling fear lasting generations. The frequency of the lynchings would stimulate the Great Migration, surging right after World War I.

The most renown lynching was of 14-year-old Emmett Till in 1955, and the blood lust of the South appeared to wane under the withering scorn of the world. But the lynching of the Civil Rights workers in 1963 revealed otherwise as the search for their bodies in the river turned up many more, defiled, unidentified, unburied, unmourned. Like the tabloids showing the victorious crowds, social media in 2017 allows us to see ‘lynchings’ in real time.

There are so many, I honestly don’t have the heart to keep up.

Two weeks ago I glanced at an account on Facebook. Below three school portraits of impossibly young Black males, the headline was almost a taunt: “Did you know these youth were killed by the police this week? …Neither did we.” Then, on Monday I received another Facebook notice of a pregnant, mentally- challenged Black woman in Seattle killed by police in front of her other children.

I am doing my best, as our people say, to stay or be “woke,” but I confess I did not have the stomach to read further. It is 2017, and lynching not only continues, it is increasing. Like the mobs of the old days, police become judge, jury and executioner. Hidden under police department policy, the names of “persons unknown” are not released until the victim’s memory (ex. Mike Brown) is sullied.

On the rare occasion that police are actually tried for murder, lackluster prosecution ensures that they are seldom convicted. And now it’s not just the police, but individual white men who decide they want to kill Black people just because they feel like it. Timothy Caughman, a homeless Black man in New York, was stabbed to death in March by a man who came from Maryland for that express purpose.

In the 1920s and 1930s, not ‘giving ground’ to a white person, like refusing to step off the sidewalk or even bumping into a white girl while running to catch a train, were lynchable offenses, and it appears they are again. Five days before his graduation in May, Bowie State College student Richard Collins III was stabbed to death while waiting for an Uber ride for refusing to “yield ground” to a white University of Maryland student.

“Where there’s a will, there’s a way; where there’s a tree there’s a rope,” the old folks said.

I had been directed by spirit to make a noose with the coarse rope, but I didn’t know how. I am glad I didn’t. Symbolically, it would knot the possibility inherent in the third line, the last utterance of this trinity.

“Where there’s life, there’s hope.” Yes. And I hope that the ancestors understood.

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Arts and Culture

COMMENTARY: Black Music is the Sound of Black Freedom: Let Us Reclaim Both This Juneteenth

Black Music Month started when Black Music Association members Ed Wright, Kenny Gamble and his wife, journalist and radio host Dyanna Williams were able to persuade President Jimmy Carter to establish the observation on June 7, 1979.

Published

1 day ago

June 9, 2026

Oakland Post

Robert Johnson (1911-1938) is thought of as the godfather of blues music, especially Delta blues. The 29 songs recorded by him during his short life have been of massive inspiration to guitarists and musicians over the last 80 years. Public domain photo.

By Wanda Ravernell

Black Music Month and Juneteenth are inextricably linked – Black music is the sound of our freedom.

From the plaintive moans of the enslaved Africans’ ‘sorrow songs,’ to the fields of Civil War battle where Black soldiers picked up abandoned bugles, to the upright piano played in juke joints on Saturday night and churches come Sunday morning, our ancestors’ innovation in the face of want, fear, degradation, and hopelessness has yielded genres of music imitated ’round the world.

In 2000, Congress made it official. In 2009, Pres. Barack Obama changed the name to African American Music Heritage Month and in 2023, Pres. Joe Biden changed it back to Black Music Month, two years after he declared Juneteenth a national holiday, the result of a movement led by Opal Lee.

Our ancestors battle for freedom over these last 400 years and the music that allowed them expression of their humanity deserved to be honored.

But we may be losing sight of the value of their sacrifices.

‘Sing a Song Full of the Faith That the Dark past Has Taught Us…’

Along with the long-known exploitation of Black musicians whose recordings were stolen by record companies, the commercialization of Juneteenth feels like another kind of theft.

I had never heard of Juneteenth until I moved to the Bay Area from my hometown of Philadelphia. I didn’t know it was one of many freedom festivals celebrated by descendants of enslaved people in the United States.

Emancipation Day was Jan. 1 in Pennsylvania, April 16 in Wash., D.C., May 20 in Florida, and Aug. 8 in Kentucky. But Juneteenth, June 19, has the most renown, known in Texas as the ‘colored peoples’ Fourth of July.’

It was marked by parades, beauty pageants, rodeos, backyard barbecues and church picnics.

Yes, church.

The formerly enslaved began the day praying in thanks for their freedom just as they had prayed for Jubilee – the day of freedom – when they had chains on their feet and hands. They ‘testified’ about their past suffering and how they had managed to overcome.

And they sang.

Although, we will not hold it this year, Omnira Institute’s Juneteenth Ritual of Remembrance recalled this part of Juneteenth with prayers in the languages of the African captives. In the middle of the ceremony, a soloist would lead us in singing “Many Thousand Gone” while we took turns reciting portions of the Emancipation Proclamation, the news of freedom that took more than two years to reach Texas – two months after the Civil War ended.

“Many Thousand Gone” was famously recorded by Black luminary Paul Robeson in 1947:

“No more auction block for me,

No more, no more

No more auction black for me

Many thousand gone.”

Other verses refer to the ‘pint of salt’ and the ‘driver’s lash,’ the realities of enslavement that they had survived.

‘Sing a Song Full of the Hope That the Present has Brought Us’

All of the genres of African American music have at their root songs like that, the essence being, as Stevie Wonder, wrote, “the joy inside our pain.” So Black music is not just music. It is our story, our history, our very strength.

During the Civil Rights Movement, which peaked 100 years after slavery ended, the people testified that it was the freedom songs – based on spirituals – that gave them the heart to march, face attack dogs, fire hoses, beatings, and shootouts with vigilantes.

The music reminded them that power was in the people. That music, our music, can do so again. We don’t have to accept the commodification of the products of our culture.

The power of those songs is showing a resurgence across the South as we battle again for the right to self-determination through the ballot box.

Those songs are the voices of our ancestors, voices forged in their blood, their sweat, their tears, joy and, above all, faith. Those songs, those prayers live in our blood and our very breath.

This Juneteenth, let us reclaim those holy voices expressed in Black music for ourselves. It is our birthright. It can neither be bought nor sold. No more. Never again.

Wanda Ravernell is the executive director of Omnira Institute, sponsor for 18 years of the Juneteenth Ritual of Remembrance and Oakland’s 11^th Annual Black-Eyed Pea Festival, which will take place on Sept. 12.