Black Stories Matter

A woman in her seventies showed up early to the first night of a grief seminar for grieving parents. She was not sure she should be there but the leader welcomed her, and since they had time he asked her about her loss.

She said “fifty years ago I gave birth to a stillborn son. Almost immediately my husband buried the body somewhere and on his return said that it was over and done with and we were not to speak of it again. I named my son Tommy. No one knows he even has a name but for fifty years I have watched children who would be the same age as my Tommy and wondered what he would look like and what kind of person he would be. My husband is gone now and I want to talk about my Tommy.”

The leader of the group is a Catholic deacon and he helped her have a memorial service for Tommy fifty years too late.

Grief whose stories are never told or heard becomes systemic grieving. The first thing I try to do when companioning someone through grief is hear their stories and hopefully help them feel like their pain has been heard and they have established the significance the death has had on their lives.

That only happens when somebody hears the pain. “That must really hurt” are the most comforting words a grieving person can hear. Those words mean somebody knows what I am going through.

The black people of America suffer from 400 years of systemic grieving because their stories have never been told, or when there were efforts at telling them, they were ignored or trivialized.

What better evidence of that statement than the Tulsa Race Massacre? The story was hidden for 100 years. I was a pastor in Tulsa from 1963 to 1973 and became friends with two black pastors. We had lunch together many times and enjoyed our visits, but the first time I heard even a hint about the Tulsa Massacre was in 2008.

An athlete kneels during the singing of the national anthem to protest police brutality to black people and suddenly it is flipped to be a refusal to honor the flag and support our troops. Someone creates a movement and a slogan saying “Black Lives Matter” and we begin to hear “All lives matter” or “Blue lives matter” and those supporting the movement are called terrorist.

Grief ignored, grief trivialized, grief denied does not go away it internalizes and festers into anger, depression, loneliness and hopelessness which impacts the psyche of a people.

White people seem to relish tracing their ancestors and find a great sense of pride and feel the family name elevated in stature when they find some historically noted person in their family tree. How many black families find loved ones sold into slavery, or lynched by some mob, or threatened by cowards hiding behind bed sheets? Can we imagine the brilliant minds that could now be a source of family pride had they not been lynched because they refused to stay in their “place” and became the horrible wore “uppity”? I can’t stand to even write the initial of the word that follows that.

The systemic grief has been building layer by layer since the first slave was captured. They lost their home country, their culture, their freedom their personhood.

I have a picture of a slave auction on my desk showing a young husband and father being led away in chains by his new “owner” while his wife is being led away by a different one and their son is clinging to his mother in terror knowing he will be the next one on the auction block. When a people must look back on that kind of history and all of the abuses that followed. The pain, the anger, the feelings of being not even second class humans beings, over the years became hopelessness and despair. Out of that comes protest that can’t really be defined. Black Lives Matter is a broad statement that really means “Will anyone ever really hear and understand the story of our grief?”

And, now when the Tulsa story is finally being revealed and the bodies of the victims being found, there is a movement and state laws forbidding the honest teaching of black history for the fear of disturbing young people’s minds? It is time for our minds to be disturbed. It is time for us to have a nightmare or so over 400 years of hidden grief and pain.

We will never solve the race problem in America until we hear the stories and they break our hearts. Then and only then will we find the empathy and motivation to dig out the systemic racism inborn in each of us and realize our current feelings toward black people make us a living part of the history of oppression. Until that happens it is far too easy to exclaim that we were not there and therefore should not be responsible.

Sixty Minutes had a great presentation of the story of a slave boat that was recently discovered buried in the river. The story was about a land owner importing 110 slaves in the hold of a ship after it was no longer legal to do so. The slaves were in the hold for weeks on end. The roof of the hold was five feet high, so they could not even stand up and were living in their own feces. They were smuggled ashore and the boat was burned and sunk to hide the evidence. After slavery the descendants of those slaves built their own town called African Town and it thrived until an interstate highway cut it in two.

After the ship was discovered, somehow a man found out that his Grandfather had been the captain of the ship and felt compelled to go to African Town and apologize to the people. Sixty Minutes was there to show the absolute joy the people felt just by a simple “I am sorry” from someone who was not guilty but felt a sense of guilt from his family connection. The response was electric and joyous. Someone had heard the story and understood.

It is time for our nation to find a way for a meaningful national apology. That may require financial reparations, but just a national acknowledgement of guilt and remorse would have a profound impact on black and white America.

Australia recently rewrote their national anthem to include the indigenous peoples there. Some kind of national action like that would have a much greater impact than we can imagine.

Black lives actually do matter and the true story of black history is the first important step toward making those lives really matter.