Last September, 107-year-old Mamie Kirkland returned to Ellisville, Mississippi, a town she left at seven years of age in 1915. Fleeing a lynch mob, Mamie’s father, Edward Lang, a laborer and aspiring minister, left town abruptly in the middle of the night with instructions for his wife to catch the train with their five children early the next morning. They were all headed to Ohio.
Mamie never forgot the urgency of that night nor the frequency of lynching in the area. She repeated this story to her children and grandchildren through the years. Her father escaped with another black man, John Hartfield. According to legend Hartfield returned to Ellisville and had a white girlfriend, a very dangerous situation. A few years later, in 1919, Hartfield was lynched for allegedly raping a white woman.
The reign of terror against black men and women across the Black Belt took place over many decades. During the early part of the 20th century in places like Ellisville a lynching was sometimes announced in the newspapers a day or two ahead of the event.
At the urging of a son and other friends and relatives 107-year-old Mrs. Kirkland returned to Ellisville to talk about the “good ole” days; and we are all the better for it. How so? Many of us are familiar with how white citizens used lynching as a main instrument of terrorism against blacks during the era of segregation and oppression, which was formal and rigid in the South and less so in the North. Some individuals managed to escape before the lynching, similar to Hartfield and Lang. One of the recurring activities of African American life during this 100 years of racial apartheid between 1865 and 1965 was black men and their families literally escaping this tyranny for safer havens in the North. This is how a large number of black families happened to move to northern cities like Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Detroit, etc. Yet very little is known about this mode of movement north. In my view the fact that this phenomenon is so little known is a tragedy, especially when descendants of many of the escapees do not know why or how their ancestors moved to their northern city.
The all too frequent failure to pass on the stories of lynching, tyranny, and midnight escapes created generations of individuals ignorant of the truth of American Apartheid and unarmed in the face of tyranny becoming institutionalized racism. When I have questioned affected individuals about not telling their stories to their children, I have often heard statements like, “It’s painful to remember those awful incidents and I did not want to inflict them on my children,” or “we should try to forget that part of our history.” Such statements are unfortunate as they are wholesale denials of important aspects of American and African American history. If we do not tell our stories then we are participants in the whitewashing of history–all to the detriment of the current status of African Americans. I am glad Mamie Kirkland told her story and is still telling it.