In last nights poetry reading Roger Reeves used the terms salisbury and lynching in the same line. Today I asked him about it, and he said there were a lot of lynchings around there. I just did a little research and found that between 1889 and 1930, one third of 44 documented NC lynchings were committed within 50 miles of Salisbury, mostly along a line from Greensboro to Charlotte. NC is about 500 miles across, and mostly rural; in this area, sparsely populated today, Im guessing from the 1910 census maybe dwelt 5% of the states entire population. So a third of the states lynchings were committed by some fraction of 5% of the people, within a limited region. It seems to me then that these particular white folks may have been especially murderous. Why do I care about this particular kernel of the American story? These are my people. My parents and a sister are buried in Salisbury, and half of my American ancestors going back to 1755 are buried in Davidson and Rowan counties. These lynchings belong to my great-grandparents generation. Ive always been told that our people did not own slaves because we were craftsmen, and I did not know until I was almost thirty that my own beloved grandparents were deeply bigoted people (although my granddad flying out of his barcalounger to switch the station every time Sammy Davis Jr came on might have clued me in). My father must have forbidden them overt displays in his childrens presence, which is an amazing notion. We have to defy our fathers for cultural shifts to take place. There are other comforting presences in my family, such as my one progressive cousin in Greensboro, and Dr. Benjamin Sherwood Hedrick, whose position against slavery caused him to be forced out of his professorship in chemistry at UNC Chapel Hill, and who was head of the U.S. Patent Office under Lincoln. Its always struck me that the name of this most illustrious ancestral cousin has never been mentioned in my family; I had to unearth him through genealogical research. Poetry, prehistoric mans mnemonic library, is yet the seat of knowledge.
Posted on: Sun, 16 Nov 2014 02:09:34 +0000
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