By Paul Tran studies Archives & Public History and is the Graduate Scholar in the Archives at the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at New York University. Paul is a 2015–2016 Publicly Active Graduate Education (PAGE) Fellow. This PAGE Blog Salon features a response to the article “Not Just Another Hashtag: Reflections on the #Charlestonsyllabus”, an important topic of the upcoming Imagining America national conference, Oct. 1-3, 2015, in Baltimore, MD.
Junie Cox stands by the body at University Hospital morgue. She studies a face that isn’t a face anymore. The body on the table isn’t a body. It’s an erasure—a statue carved away until only its scent remains. It smells like something burning, she thinks. Like the church roof collapsing to reveal a sky redrawn with ash blacker than the angels she knows will live there. Then Junie sees the little brown shoe, the only article flames couldn’t claim, and she immediately recognizes it: the loafer, the angel’s body, the face where Addie Mae Collins used to be.
//
I learned about the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing on 15 September 1963 in my first history class at Brown University. Professor Francoise Hamlin read the dead’s names aloud for us to hear: Addie Mae Collins, 14; Cynthia Wesley, 14; Carole Robertson, 14; and Carol Denise McNair, 11 years old. At 10:22 a.m., as 200 church members arrived for 11 a.m. service, a bomb detonated on the church’s east side. The interior walls crumbled. Smoke choked the corridors. Just moments before, Sarah Collins Cox, Junie’s little sister, watched Addie Mae help Denise tie her belt in the basement bathroom. Then Addie adjusted her own sash in the mirror. Then nineteen dynamite sticks exploded under the stairwell. Then Sarah woke with twenty-three pieces of glass in her eyes. She couldn’t remember or see anything.
//
Mother, dear, may I go downtown
Instead of out to play,
And march the streets of Birmingham
In a Freedom March today?
No, baby, no, you may not go,
For the dogs are fierce and wild,
And clubs and hoses, guns and jails,
Aren’t good for a little child.
—Dudley Randell, “Ballad of Birmingham,” Cities Burning (Broadside Press, 1968)
//
In 1990, Brown added a 15,000 square foot building to the east side of the John Carter Brown Library. The Hartman-Cox Architects from Washington D.C. framed an ornamented Indiana limestone panel on the south exterior. It reads, “Speak to the past and it shall teach thee.”
I faced the slab on my first day of school and imagined the black and brown bodies retrieving and cutting the stone. I imagined them transferring its heft to the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations the way some people in this country have no choice but to carry their past like limestone blocks. I imagined them installing it onto a building built by previous black and brown bodies at a university infamously constructed by black and brown bodies and renamed in recognition of a $5000 gift from Nicholas Brown, a Providence businessman and alumnus, whose family’s wealth derived from the exploitation of black and brown bodies.
Of course I imagined and heard deep in my soul the implements used to emboss each letter of each word as I passed the John Carter Brown Library to Professor Hamlin’s class every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 11 a.m. during my sophomore year.
//
Demands to investigate the Birmingham Church Bombing went unanswered for over a decade. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had identities of each bomber. It blocked prosecution against four suspects. After J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI, died in 1972, Alabama Attorney General Bob Baxley successfully reopened investigations in 1977. He tried Ku Klux Klan leader Robert E. Chambliss, who denied the charges and died in prison in 1985. Investigators later reopened the case and brought in Klan members Thomas Blanton and Bobby Frank Cherry, who wouldn’t be convicted until 2001 and 2002 respectively. The fourth suspect, Herman Frank Cash, died before his trial.
//
Addie Mae Collins and her sisters went door to door after school. They sold their mother’s cotton aprons.
Before her death, Cynthia Wesley’s father patrolled their Smithfield neighborhood for bombers. They lived on Dynamite Hill. He found his daughter in the University Hospital morgue by a ring her playmate gave her.
Carole Robertson sang in the choir. She had black patent leather tap shoes and loved dancing the chacha.
Denise McNair had a white doll. She orchestrated tea parties and skits for it.
//
White is the color of Denise’s doll.
White is the color of the sash Addie Mae adjusted.
White is the color of Cynthia’s slip,
which her mother told her to fix before she stood in front of God.
White is the color of the hands that planted dynamite inside the church.
White is the color of dynamite exploding.
White is the color of clouds before ash.
White is the color of an eye before shot through with glass.
White is the color of the men who weren’t indicted.
White is the color of the men who prevented these men from being indicted.
White is the color of a blank page before History invades it with ink.
White is the color of a page when History’s redacted.
White is the color of libraries where History that survives—
or, rather, History that’s deliberately preserved—is kept.
White is the color of limestone.
White is the color of words carved into limestone.
White is the color of Speak to the past and it shall teach thee.
White is the color of the past when it’s forgotten.
White is the color of forgetting.
White is the color of what happens we continue to forget.
//
On 17 June 2015, Dylann Roof, 21 years old, shot nine black people during prayer service at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina.
Roof owned a website called The Last Rhodesian, where he posted an anti-black manifesto. The manifesto has 2,444 words. It seeks forgiveness for “any typos” because Dylann was “in a great hurry” and “didn’t have time to check it.”
//
The Sunday school lesson on 15 September 1963 at the 16th Street Baptist Church was forgiveness.
//
Say their names.
Cynthia Hurd—
Clementa Pinckney—
Sharonda Coleman-Singleton—
Daniel Simmons—
Depayne Middleton-Doctor—
Tywanza Sanders—
Myra Thompson—
Susie Jackson—
Ethel Lance.
//
Professor Hamlin taught me that history matters. Critically examining our multiple pasts compels complicated and often contradictory understandings of our multiple presents and futures. Most importantly, it compels compassion for our human condition, our shared contexts, and our courage in the face of every force that threatens to obliterate us from this world.
//
Historians Chad Williams, Kidada Williams, and Keisha N. Blain, and librarians Cecily Walker, Ryan P. Randall, and Melissa Merrone created the #CharlestonSyllabus to help us understand the context and consequence of the Charleston shooting.
//
I read each title on the #CharlestonSyllabus and found text I studied in Professor Hamlin’s class.
I found text I used to teach high school students about race and U.S. Empire at a free arts studio called New Urban Arts on Westminster Street in Providence.
I found material I consulted to coach the Barnard College and Columbia University poetry slam team, whose members—Gabrielle Smith, Chloe “Kidd” Matthews, Ficara McDoom, and Max Binder—wrote a 3-minute persona poem on the Birmingham Church Bombing.
//
God sends angels
to Earth with purpose.
When your job’s done,
you burst
into the cluster of stars
God made you from—
become light for us.
These girls became
the North Star
for the Civil Rights Movement
taken away by terrorism.
Black women
and children
have always been angels
praying the fire away.
This was no accident.
The enemies of our country’s
democracy
are never far away.
They live next door.
They’re a shadow
moving in the dark.
You may not see
or want to see.
But they’re always there.
—Smith, et al., “Birmingham” (2015).
//
Professor Hamlin’s first book is Crossroads at Clarksdale: The Black Freedom Struggle in the Mississippi Delta after World War II (University of North Carolina Press: 2012).
It opens with a quotation from Eudora Welty.
It is by knowing where you stand that you grow able
to judge where you are. Place absorbs our earliest notice
and attention, it bestows upon us our original awareness; and our
critical powers spring up from the study of it and the growth
experiences inside it…One place comprehended can make us
understand other places better. Sense of place gives us
equilibrium; extended, it is sense of direction too.
//
Understanding what happened in Charleston helps us understand the worlds we inhabit. Charleston’s local histories, its triumphs and tragedies, help us vanquish distorted visions of the past that engender misinformed and intentionally inaccurate knowledge about the United States and its imperial legacies. By holding the matrix of events that combined to precipitate unforgivable violence, we recognize the act of white terrorism as not exceptional, but a result of our world historical formation and its requisite social order. Though far from effectual pedagogy, the #CharlestonSyllabus contributes to ongoing national conversations about race and empire in the United States from contact to present. It’s not another hashtag. It’s an archive. It’s taking back the page where History was first written and then redacted. It’s excavating the brown shoe or the playmate’s ring and reassembling the children’s bodies. It’s alchemizing a body from ash and memory. It’s rebuilding an eye full of shattered glass.