Mamie Kirkland, Witness to an Era of Racial Terror, Dies at 111

https://www.nytimes.com/20…/…/09/us/mamie-kirkland-dead.html

Mamie Kirkland, Witness to an Era of Racial Terror, Dies at 111

She endured the horrors of the African-American experience — lynchings, riots, the Ku Klux Klan — and worked to ensure that they never slipped from collective memory.

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Haunted by Memories for 100 Years

In 1915, Mamie Kirkland and her family fled Ellisville, Miss., in fear that her father would be lynched. She swore she would never return. But at age 107, she made the journey.

by Dan Barry

January 9, 2020

New York Times

PHOTO: In 1915, Mamie Kirkland and her family fled Ellisville, Miss., in fear that her father would be lynched. She swore she would never return. But at age 107, she made the journey.CreditCredit...Andrea Morales for The New York Times

Mamie Lang Kirkland died last month at her home in upstate New York. She was the mother of nine, the matriarch of another 158, a longtime  saleswoman for Avon Products, and, at the time of her death, at 111, the oldest resident of Buffalo.

That only begins to describe Ms. Kirkland.

She was also the embodiment of the African-American experience of the 20th century, her life’s long journey altered repeatedly by the racial  violence and bigotry coursing through the United States. Lynchings, riots, the Ku Klux Klan — she survived it all, and spent her centenarian  years working to ensure that these realities never slipped from collective memory.

Her life helped inspire the creation, in 2018, of the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, in Montgomery, Ala. Both document the country’s history of racial terrorism and encourage social justice.

Ms. Kirkland figures in two of the exhibits, said Sia Sanneh, a senior attorney with the Equal Justice Initiative, the nonprofit that started the memorials. “Her life was such an inspiration to us,” Ms. Sanneh said. “It embodied all those things.”

Mamie Lang was born on Sept. 3, 1908, in the rural Mississippi town of Ellisville, the daughter of Edward Lang, a laborer and fledgling minister, and Rochelle (Moore) Lang, who minded the family’s rented home. Ms. Kirkland would remember the large peach tree in the yard, and the strange brew concocted by her grandmother that saved her from a typhomalarial fever when she was near death at age 5.

When she was about 7, her father awakened the family to announce that it was time to leave — some local white men were preparing to lynch him and his friend, John Hartfield. The two men slipped out of town that night; Rochelle and the five Lang children, including a nursing baby, escaped by train in the morning.

Ms. Kirkland, with family members and her supporters from the Equal Justice Initiative, prayed at the approximate spot where John Hartfield, her father’s friend, was lynched in 1919.

Ms. Kirkland, with family members and her supporters from the Equal Justice Initiative, prayed at the approximate spot where John Hartfield, her father’s friend, was lynched in 1919.Credit...Andrea Morales for The New York Times

The family friend, Mr. Hartfield, eventually returned to Ellisville, and in the summer of 1919 he was accused of raping a white woman. Some townspeople set a date for his lynching, a public event that the governor of Mississippi claimed he was powerless to prevent. At an appointed time announced in The Jackson Daily News, crowds gathered near a large gum tree beside the train tracks. There Mr. Hartfield was strung up and hanged, after which his body was riddled with bullets and burned. Body parts became souvenirs.

“Could have been my father,” Ms. Kirkland said in an interview with The New York Times in 2015.

Though the Lang family had fled to East St. Louis, Ill., they still could not outrun the racist violence. In 1917, white men responded to the pressures of changing demographics and job competition by rioting in black neighborhoods, burning down homes and shooting residents. Dozens died, thousands were left homeless, and 9-year-old Mamie was seared by the memory of seeing a deaf man shot dead because he could not hear an order to halt.

The family moved again, this time to Alliance, Ohio, reflecting another aspect of the black experience: the Great Migration of the last century, when six million African-Americans left the rural South for the urban Northeast and Midwest — some seeking economic opportunity, others hoping to escape racial terrorism.

Sometimes it followed them north.

In Alliance, in the 1920s, members of the Ku Klux Klan — whose rallies were casually announced in the local press — came to the family’s home, hoods donned and torches afire, to burn a cross on their lawn. The Langs always wondered what would have happened if armed white neighbors hadn’t arrived to chase away the aggressors.

At 15, Mamie married an itinerant railroad worker named Albert Kirkland, and the couple moved to Buffalo. He found work as a grinder at the Pratt & Letchworth plant; she gave birth to nine children, six of whom reached adulthood, and immersed herself in the First Shiloh Baptist Church, of which she was a foundational member.

After her husband died in 1959, Ms. Kirkland worked as a domestic helper and babysitter before becoming a door-to-door saleswoman for Avon. She never learned to drive, and often attributed her longevity to her faith and those many years walking the Buffalo streets selling beauty products. She was still taking orders until a few weeks before her death on Dec. 28, according to her son Tarabu Betserai Kirkland.

Mr. Kirkland, her youngest child at 70, said that his mother’s experience with Avon helped her to shed her shyness and embrace her ability to connect with people. Over time, he said, she became a kind of door-to-door life coach.

“Folks didn’t want her to leave the house,” Mr. Kirkland said in a phone interview this week. “She would help them figure out ways to manage.”

But there was one place that Ms. Kirkland refused to visit: the state of her birth, where the terror of racism had scarred her childhood. She often said that she didn’t even want to see Mississippi on a map.

Her son had been nudging her to tell her life’s powerful story, and in 2015 he showed her a report by the Equal Justice Initiative called “Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror.” It included an image of an old newspaper’s headline: “John Hartfield Will Be Lynched By Ellisville Mob at 5 O’Clock This Afternoon.”

“We had never seen anything documented about John Hartfield,” Mr. Kirkland said. “For a long time we didn’t know if it was fact or fiction. But then she pointed to my laptop and said, ‘That’s him.’ And chills went up my back.”

PHOTO: “I left Mississippi a scared little girl of 7 years old,” Ms. Kirkland said in 2016. “Now I’m 107 — and I’m not frightened anymore.”Credit: Andrea Morales for The New York Times

A few months later, Ms. Kirkland returned to Ellisville with her son, who has been working on a documentary film about his mother’s journey. It was an emotional visit to a place that seemed to have erased the Hartfield lynching from memory. Ms. Kirkland took time to pray at the approximate spot where a mob had killed her father’s friend.

“She always maintained this level of grace and forgiveness,” Mr. Kirkland said. “I’m not sure I could do that.”

In addition to her son, Ms. Kirkland’s survivors include her daughters Juanita Hunter, Beatrice Kirkland, Margaret Kirkland and Jeanette Clinton.

In 2016, the Equal Justice Initiative honored Ms. Kirkland at a fund-raising gala in Manhattan. She and her son worked for weeks on her short speech, in which she planned to tell the young people in the audience that stories like hers needed to be told again and again; that stories like hers were just as important now as they were a century ago; that she should know, because she had been there.

Her speech reflected a resilient optimism; a determination to triumph over tribulation. “I left Mississippi a scared little girl of 7 years old,” Ms. Kirkland said at the event. “Now I’m 107 — and I’m not frightened anymore.”

Organizers fretted about how their guest would ascend to the stage, and they offered her a wheelchair. She declined, saying that she intended to walk on her own.

And she did.

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Horror Drove Her From South. 100 Years Later, She Returned.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Dan Barry is a longtime reporter and columnist, having written both the “This Land” and “About New York” columns. The author of several books, he writes on myriad topics, including sports, culture, New York City, and the nation. @DanBarryNYT • Facebook

PHOTO: In 1915, Mamie Kirkland and her family fled Ellisville, Miss., in fear that her father would be lynched. She swore she would never return. 

But at age 107, she made the journey. Credit:  Andrea Morales for The New York Times

Isabel Wilkerson On the Great Black Migration and the History of White Supremacy And Systemic Racial Oppression in the Northern and Western Regions of the United States

All,

A great article by a great writer, the always profound (and Pulitzer Prize receipient) Isabel Wilkerson…please read and pass the word...

Kofi

ISABEL WILKERSON

(b. 1961)

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/11/opinion/sunday/when-will-the-north-face-its-racism.html

Sunday Review | Opinion

When Will the North Face Its Racism?

By ISABEL WILKERSON

JANUARY 10, 2015

NEW YORK TIMES

Lily vendors in Chicago, April 1941. Credit Edwin Rosskam/Library of Congress

ATLANTA — THE groundswell of protests over police brutality in the closing days of 2014, when people dropped to the marble floor of Grand Central Terminal and shut down the Brooklyn Bridge, blocked Lake Shore Drive in Chicago and chanted “I Can’t Breathe” from Boston to Oakland, summoned ghosts not only of the marches of the civil rights era but of the larger forces that led to the arrival of so many African-Americans in the big cities of the North and West in the first place.

Dozens of cities would ultimately join in these demonstrations of discontent. But a map of the largest protests those first nights, and of the high-profile cases of police violence in recent months, lit up like a map of the Great Migration: New York, Chicago, Cleveland, St. Louis, Philadelphia, Washington, Los Angeles, Oakland, all of them the major receiving stations of the movement. These were the places to which generations of African-Americans fled to escape the state-sanctioned violence their descendants have now faced in the North and West.

In matters of racial injustice, the South has been the center of attention since before the time of the Civil War. But the North, with its shorter history of a mass black population, has only more recently dealt with the paradox of an enlightened ideal coexisting with racial disparity. The protests have become a referendum on the black condition since the Great Migration. “The protests are beginning to wake people up to the idea that the problems are not only there but have been obvious all along,” the historian Taylor Branch told me. “It feels like the South in the 1950s.”

It was because of the Great Migration — six million black Southerners fleeing Jim Crow from World War I to the 1970s — that African-Americans now live in every state of the union. They were seeking political asylum within their own country in what was, in effect, one of the nation’s largest and longest mass demonstrations against injustice. It was barely recognized for what it was at the time, arising as it did organically, rather than from a single leader, much like the protests today. Both migrants and protesters were pleading with the world to take notice that something was terribly wrong in the places where they lived.

In the early decades of the 20th century, a caste system ruled the South with such repression that every four days an African-American was  lynched for some perceived breach or mundane accusation — having stolen 75 cents or made off with a mule. Those conditions forced most every black family to consider the best course of action to feel safe and free. “Where can we go,” a black woman in Alabama wrote in 1902, “to feel that security which other people feel?”

Generations later, police killings of African-Americans occur as often as twice a week for at times mundane infractions and at three times the rate as for whites, according to conservative estimates from recent studies. What happens in the moments after these encounters reveals a disregard for black life as disturbing as the shootings themselves. In the case of Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old with a toy gun who was shot within seconds of a squad car’s arrival at a Cleveland park, new video released this week showed officers wrestling the boy’s 14-year-old sister to the ground and handcuffing her as she appeared to run toward her bleeding brother.

Such cases force black families again to consider how to safeguard their children and themselves from the violence they suffer at a disproportionate rate at the hands of authorities assigned to protect them. They are still giving a version of the same talk their ancestors gave their children back in the old country of the South, about answering yes, sir, and no, sir, and watching how they comport themselves around the upper caste and the police.

Now, as then, those kitchen table discussions signal a painful coming to terms with one’s tenuous condition in one’s own land. What was little understood at the time of the migration was that the refugees from the South shared the same dreams as the immigrants who stepped off the ships at Ellis Island, huddled masses yearning to breathe free. One of the few contemporaneous studies in the early years of the migration, published by the Chicago Commission on Race Relations in 1922, surveyed Southern migrants to determine why they had come north and what they had hoped to find. The migrants responded:

“Freedom in voting and the conditions of the colored people here.”

“Freedom and chance to make a living.”

“Freedom and opportunity to acquire something.”

“Freedom of speech, right to live and work as other races.”

“Freedom of speech and action. Can live without fear, no Jim Crow.”

Those desires went little noticed. Indeed, it was resentment toward the Southerners’ arrival and obstacles to their entering the mainstream of Northern life that helped create the current conditions. Northern cities had had limited exposure to African-Americans. These cities were ill-prepared to absorb large numbers of asylum seekers who stood out from the rest of the population.

And so the newcomers were met with suspicion. Often recruited as strikebreakers, they were denied access to some unions and trades and  were paid the lowest wages for the dirtiest work. They were roped off into overcrowded ghettos by means of redlining and periodic firebombings of homes purchased by black residents who breached the de facto wall of segregation.

Unlike the immigrants from Europe, they could not shield themselves from the assumptions about their heritage or blend into the majority just by Anglicizing their names or mastering the senator’s English. They stood out as the children of enslavement and Jim Crow, unable to escape the burden of a pained history.

It was a measure of how dire conditions were in the South that the Great Migration continued into the 1970s. When it began, 90 percent of all African-Americans were living in the South. By the time it ended, nearly half of all African-Americans lived elsewhere.

Notably, however, high profile-cases of police brutality have recently come to be associated with the North rather than the South. And it is in the South that two recent cases of police shootings of unarmed black people resulted in more vigorous prosecution. Last month, as protests raged over the deaths of Michael Brown in Missouri, Eric Garner in New York and John Crawford and Tamir Rice in Ohio, Randall Kerrick, a police officer in Charlotte, N.C., made his first court appearance on a charge of voluntary manslaughter in the 2013 death of Jonathan Ferrell. Mr. Ferrell was an unarmed black motorist who was shot 10 times as he sought help after a car accident. In September, Sean Groubert, a South Carolina state trooper, was fired after shooting an unarmed man, Levar Jones, during a traffic stop over a seatbelt violation. In a widely circulated video of the incident, Mr. Jones asked the trooper with humbling composure, “What did I do, sir?” Then: “Why did you shoot me?” He survived his injuries. The trooper was arrested and charged with aggravated assault and battery, a felony that carries a possible 20-year prison term.

The nation still has far to go, but this, at least, seems cause for hope. It suggests that the South, after decades of wrestling with its history, is now willing to face injustice head on. And it suggests that the North, after decades of insisting that it was fairer and more free, could eventually do the same.

It is not known what will come of the current upheaval in the North. The protests are a response to unprosecuted police brutality but are also a plea for recognition of African-Americans’ humanity. How can success be measured when the goals are so basic and enduring? History tells us that enough people acting together can have an impact beyond what could be imagined. The Great Migration changed American culture as we know it, produced jazz and Motown, playwrights and novelists, and transformed the social geography of most every city outside of the South. At the start of the movement, one of its chroniclers put the migrants’ aims in perspective. “If all of their dream does not come true,” The Chicago Defender newspaper wrote, “enough will come to pass to justify their actions.”

If the events of the last year have taught us anything, it is that, as much progress has been made over the generations, the challenges of color and tribe were not locked away in another century or confined to a single region but persist as a national problem and require the commitment of the entire nation to resolve.

Isabel Wilkerson is the author of “The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration” and a former national correspondent and bureau chief for The New York Times.