The Episcopal Diocese of Atlanta, which includes Macon and several parishes beyond Macon will be launching a three year cycle of pilgrimages next year to sites where lynchings occurred. The purpose of these events will be to place historical markers at these sites along with acknowledging those who were martyred.
On August 15, 2015 over 1500 people gathered in Hayneville, Alabama to remember the 50th anniversary of the death of Jonathan Myrick Daniels, a young seminary student who was killed there in 1965. We remembered him along with several others who were killed during those days when white violence against blacks was a common practice. There were about three hundred of us from this Diocese and that glorious day will be remembered for years to come, but we must go beyond it to explore martyrdom in Georgia.
Our Diocesan Commission for Dismantling Racism has the intention of making sure that all of our work leads us forward as we keep our feet marching toward racial healing and reconciliation. Lynching is a part of our collective history and we have tried very hard to put it aside. But it continues to haunt us as we see its mean spirit reasserted in mass incarceration, the enforcement of the death penalty and of late in state sanctioned murders of hundreds of black people who happen to be mostly young males. The type of disgust for the black body that led to the horrors of lynching and the mutilations that were often a part of those lynchings continues to provide the foundation for the ways in which black people are profiled and unfairly handled in the legal system and in the mass killings that continue to this day of young black folks at the hands of some law enforcers under circumstances that are questionable at the very least.
Lynching was often state sanctioned as is the death penalty and the extrajudicial killings of today. It seems to us on the Commission for Dismantling Racism that there is something to be learned from the past that can help us and that there are some loose ends from the past around this part of our history that need to be recognized. Most of the folks who died at the hands of lynchers were never acknowledged as the martyrs that they are. It does not matter to us what the reasons were that resulted in their deaths because we know that most of the stated reasons had little to do with the truth of why they were being killed.
In addition to the pilgrimages to the sites that we will be planning for next year, we will develop a curriculum of study to accompany our three year pilgrimage cycle. We will have book studies, lectures, film series and art exhibits which will help us to foster the conversations that we expect to have across this Diocese.
The Equal Justice Initiative recently released their extensive study on lynching across the south and a copy of that publication can be obtained without cost by simply contacting them. The rage and grief of the 21st Century is partially rooted in the attempt to deny past acts of dehumanization such as lynching and it is a good time to turn our attention in that direction to see if we can open up dialogue and create enough consciousness to lead us to a better place as a culture. Knowledge can be liberating if people are willing to embrace it. Speaking about the unspeakable can be freeing as well but we have to be willing to put forth the effort to march in that direction. We are marching on toward freedom with this effort and would like to issue an invitation for everyone who is interested creating a possibility for healing to join us in the fall of 2016 for the inauguration of this journey toward racial healing and the possibility of reconciliation.
Catherine Meeks, Ph.D, Chair, Beloved Community: Commission for Dismantling Racism, Episcopal Diocese of Atlanta