A Lynching Memorial Unveiled in Duluth

Nations deal with nightmares the same way people do ? by trying to forget them. Among the nightmares that had faded from public memory in the United States until recently, none are more ghastly than the campaign of racial terror that gripped this country from the 1880's to the 1930's, when thousands of black Americans were hanged, mutilated, burned alive or dragged to death while huge crowds looked on.

Sometimes called "lynching bees" or "Negro barbecues," these events were cast as macabre carnivals, which drew crowds with children and picnic baskets from miles around. The victims' bodies were sometimes photographed for postcards, which were used as instruments of terror until mailing such postcards was barred in the early 20th century. Lynching was not always just random violence. It was sometimes semiofficial violence, directed by whites who feared business competition from emerging black entrepreneurs and who hated the crusading newspapers of the Negro press, which began pressing aggressively for full citizenship for black people around World War I. [P6: emphasis added]

Americans who know of the violence of this period at all tend to believe that it was confined to the segregationist South. But the fact that lynchings took place in many parts of the country was underscored recently in the northern Minnesota city of Duluth when the city unveiled a moving memorial commemorating the deaths of Elmer Jackson, Elias Clayton and Isaac McGhie, three young black men who were lynched in Duluth in 1920 while a mob of 10,000 looked on.

The dedication drew thousands of people from all over the area. The emotional high point came with a speech by Warren Read, a fourth-grade teacher from Kingston, Wash., who had learned while researching his family that his great-grandfather had helped lead the mob that stormed the local jail and took the three men, who were circus workers, from their cells. His voice choking with emotion, he apologized to the victims and their families.

The memorial in Duluth is part of a national journey that began in the 1990's, when scholars and museums began to pull back the covers on a shameful and horrific period. After nearly a half-century of turning away, the country now seems more ready to look its nightmare squarely in the eye.