Lynched by Angela D. Sims

Author:Angela D. Sims [Sims, Angela D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: History, United States, 20th Century, Political Science, Terrorism, Psychology, Cognitive Psychology & Cognition, Religion, Christian Theology, General, Psychology of Religion, Social Science, Ethnic Studies, American, African American & Black Studies, Discrimination
ISBN: 9781481306058
Google: ElIGvgAACAAJ
Publisher: Baylor University Press
Published: 2017-01-15T00:23:07+00:00

Remembering Lynching: “Can’t forget the past”

A military veteran and deacon in the Church of God in Christ, Junius Nottingham Sr. resides in the Southwest Philadelphia row house in which he and his late wife, Dorcas Dorothy Nottingham, raised their four children. He purchased his home in the late 1950s on the G.I. Bill and worked several jobs upon leaving the army. The “second black to be hired in the plumbing department,” Nottingham retired from the Philadelphia Board of Education on January 2, 1998, after almost thirty years of service. Some might say that his children defy the odds with undergraduate degrees from Temple, Drexel, and West Chester Universities. Because he and his wife “knew the importance of education,” their “kids knew that it was not going to be twelve years of schooling, and then that was it. We explained either college, trade school, business school, military.”

Living in a sector of the city that has a 36.4 percent poverty rate with only 7.2 percent of its residents college graduates,8 Nottingham insists that lynching must be a concern for the church in the twenty-first century “because once you lose sight on history you cannot go to the future. Because if you lose sight on the past, you’re going to go into the future, and if you’re not careful, you’re going to be doing some of the same things that happened in the past.” Born November 27, 1933, in Cape Charles, Virginia, on the “eastern shore . . . right before you cross the Chesapeake Bay to go into Norfolk,” Nottingham speaks frankly about a need to recall the insidious nature of lynching culture.

All too often, as in Nottingham’s case, memories of lynching are transmitted across generations. Speaking about his earliest recollection of this cultural practice, he explains:

[My] grandfather said as a boy he saw many a man lynched. He said if some of the men would talk back or either if they act like they didn’t want to do what “the white man said do,” they were lynched. And, my grandfather said they couldn’t do anything about it, because they had no control. So, it was more or less they saw, but they could not speak.9

Although Nottingham’s grandfather may not have spoken out publicly, this recounting serves as evidence that a type of talking took place that may merit further analysis to determine how or whether this form of transmission is reflective of practices associated with religious practices of formerly enslaved persons, most notably embodied expressions associated with hush harbors.10 Nottingham stated that as a life-preserving measure his grandfather also

shared with [Nottingham] that often times that they would see men go down the road as if they were going home. They would never see them anymore. But then word would get back, so-and-so had been lynched. And, he said his mother and father—certain times, they would not allow him to go into the woods, because they knew that it was men that had been lynched—in the woods.

This cultural awareness led Nottingham as

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