Black Lives Do Matter
by Sandy Brown.
Black Lives Really Do Matter. Period.
When I was a teenager my pastor took me and one other youth group member on a drive around my hometown, Jacksonville, Illinois. He was pointing out the outhouses behind homes in a particular part of town. We were in the neighborhood of Lincoln and Jefferson schools, which my parents had explained was where black people lived. My Dad had often complained about the nice cars sitting outside shacks with outhouses.
I asked my pastor about this and he explained, “In this town Blacks can only live in these neighborhoods. They have money, but are shut out of living on the other side of the tracks. They can afford a nice car, so that is where they spend their money.”
That drive around, and that pastor, started my lifelong journey to learn why it is that I need to say “Black lives matter.” instead of simply, “All lives matter.”
This was the background of my formative years. I will never understand what it was like to grow up black. I barely even observed the differences until that day. It’s not that I don’t want to understand what it means to be black, it is that I cannot. If I claim that I do, then I deny my own racism and stop learning.
I am what most people would call a liberal. I have been progressive in my view of racial issues since I was in college. There is no excuse for pride in these statements. As a liberal I would put up a “Black Lives Matter” sign in a hot minute. As a human being, I have to question how much I mean it.
Brenda Huey’s book, The Blackest Land, The Whitest People: Greenville, Texas. The Untold Story of My Hometown , (Not an affiliate link. )has taught me much about the lives of black people. It is the story of the black community in a small city in Northeast Texas: Greenville.
Brenda tells stories that make connections for me.
It is not a shocking expose` of how black people were persecuted by bad white guys.
In it she tells what it was like to grow up black in a racist town where people faced discrimination and brutal lynching, but also loved their families, went to school, worked to succeed, hurt each other, helped each other, loved each other, and found ways to prosper.
The reason I picked this book up in the first place is a story worth telling.
My parents were from Greenville and are buried there at Forest Park Cemetery. They are buried next to the graves of their best friends, my Uncle Chat and Aunt Faye (Dad’s sister). I never lived in Greenville, but grew up going back there every year to see my grandmother and all the cousins.
These were years when the famous sign that hung over the highway coming into town was still there. The sign said, “Greenville Texas: The Blackest Land. The Whitest People.”
As a kid I didn’t think much about the sign, but as a teenager with my eyes cracked open a slit by a good pastor, I wondered what life was like for black people living in a town that saw itself in those terms.
Brenda and I are the same age. Her account of growing up in that time overlapped with mine though from totally different perspectives. Brenda tells her own story in the context of the larger story of what the Black community in Greenville experienced during those years.
It was a shock for me to read names of my family members in stories that Brenda told.
She tells the story of how, in 1908, there was a horrific incident when a Black man, Ted Smith, was captured and burned at the stake as a rapist. The Greenville Banner article, quoted in entirety in the book, reported that Mr. Smith had been staying at the Bud Norman farm 6 miles west of town.
Bud Norman is the name of my cousin. He grew up on a farm west of Greenville and was called Bud after his grandfather. His full name is Chapman like his father, who was called Chat and is buried next to my father. Names run in families.
All this adds up to a deeper personal connection to events that tell the story of why black lives matter. It was later proved that Ted Smith was innocent.
While my parents were kind people, they were part of the racist culture of North Texas and America. They grew up in it and did not want life to be any different than it was. They did not like the extreme racists, but they couln’t understand why such nice cars were parked outside shacks, and did not want a black for a neighbor.
They considered Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to be a troublemaker. He was trying to change things. Standing up for your people was fine, but changing the way things were done was not. I admired Dr. King and used to fight about him with my parents.
They did not hate Black people, but they would never have said that Black lives matter.
They were like so many Americans, racist by default. It is hard to move out of that position and I don’t know what they would think today. One of the best things I can say about Ms. Huey’s book, and my mother, is that I think that Mom would have liked and learned from it. For all I know our mothers may have known each other.
In her chapter, “Historical Lynchings & Other Crimes,” Brenda tells the story of how Lenell Geter was falsely convicted of a robbery in 1982 in Greenville. Eyewitnesses had identified him as the culprit. In 1984 those eyewitnesses were discredited by Geter’s co-workers from E Systems, who said clearly that he had been working in his office with them when the crime was committed. The conviction was overturned and he was released after being imprisoned for 18 months.
In 1987 a movie, Guilty of Innocence, told the whole story. My Mom lived in Greenville then and I called her. “Mom, there’s a movie about Greenville on TV.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“Do you know anything about it? What happened?”
“This old lady who lived across the street from the park was listening to the radio and heard about the robbery. She saw a black man she didn’t recognize sitting on the bench reading a paper and decided that he must have done it, so she called the Sheriff, and everybody knows he’s a racist bastard. He came out and they arrested him and the old lady testified that she saw him do it.”
My mother was dealing with the racism of her time.
Brenda walked past that sign twice a day for most of her young life.
She tells stories of her family and of going to school and of black persons from Greenville that were successful, some in ways that took them far from Texas. She chronicles the ‘firsts’ for blacks in Greenville, including herself being in the first non-segregated group of students to go through Greenville schools.
As she wondered about how she had explored the avenues of her life she writes, “It was not until 30 years later, while watching clips of the civil rights movement on television relating to integration, that the full reality of this touched my heart. As I watched, I cried hysterically. For the first time I realized that I was part of a historical event.” (p. 3)
I will never know what it is like to be a Black person, but Brenda’s stories help me. She grew up, with all of the challenges, fears, successes, heroes, fun, and loves that all of us have. Her life then was different from mine, but not so different that I cannot say clearly, with greater understanding than before, Black Lives Matter.
We need to tell and listen to these stories. They could be told for every town everywhere. I wonder what it meant to grow up black in Jacksonville, the town where I grew up. The drive around with my pastor opened my eyes, but I wonder what it was really like.
I remember the black kids in my class, but I did not really know them.
I wish one of them would write a memoir. Maybe someone has and I have not yet found it. I did a little research. Abraham Brown and I, Alexander Brown, found ourselves alphabetically linked throughout high school. He was one of the 12 black kids in our class of 300.
I Googled his name and found that he had died in 2017 at the age of 68. He had been a well loved coach at East Texas State University in Commerce, Texas, where my father had earned a degree. He is buried less that 20 miles from where my parents are buried in Brenda Huey’s home town.
I yearn to know the stories of this timeline and migration.
How can I honor the Black Lives Matter movement?
Learn about Black lives, and then connect to those lives anyway I can. Seek out people who can tell the whole story. Listen. Learn first hand why Black lives matter. I believe that if I can connect more personally to these stories, then my life will matter more as well.
Thank you, Brenda.
Sandy Brown is an actor, writer, teacher, and beer sampler enjoying a new life by not retiring on time.