Good Friday Black Lives Matter Stations of the Cross, Norfolk, VA, Catholic Worker
Frank Cordaro
Station I: Jesus is Condemned to Death
Leader: We adore You, O Christ, and we praise
You.
All: Because by your holy cross You
have redeemed the world.
Bryan Stevenson:
Beginning in the 17th century, millions of African people were kidnapped, enslaved, and shipped across the Atlantic to the Americas under horrific conditions. Nearly two million people died at sea during the agonizing journey. For the next two and a half centuries, the enslavement of Black people in the United States created wealth, opportunity, and prosperity for millions of Americans.
Enslavers in the North American colonies which became the United States wanted to feel like they were moral people. They were Christians. To justify being Christian while owning and trading in human beings they created the narrative of racial difference—the false belief that Black people are inferior, less than human, created subordinate to whites.
The idea of black inferiority survived slavery’s abolition and is perhaps it’s cruelest legacy. This belief in racial hierarchy legitimated, perpetuated and defended slavery, then legally codified segregation, lynching, convict leasing, mass incarceration, and an unbroken history of vigilante and police killings unarmed Black people. It continues to perpetuate racial inequality today in public policy, family wealth, healthcare, the law, the criminal justice system, education, housing, voting rights, and many other aspects of culture and society.
This dehumanizing myth of racial difference endures today because we don’t want to talk about it.
James Cone:
Unlike Europeans who immigrated to this land to escape from tyranny, Africans came in chains to serve a nation of tyrants.
[White Supremacy] is found in every aspect of American life, especially churches, seminaries, and theology.
White supremacy is America’s original sin and liberation is the Bible’s central message. Any theology in America that fails to engage white supremacy and God’s liberation of Black people from that evil is not Christian theology but a theology of the Antichrist.
[White supremacy] is the Antichrist in America because it has killed and crippled tens of millions of Black bodies and minds, it has also committed genocide against the indigenous people of this land. If that isn’t demonic, I don’t know what is.
* * *
Trayvon Martin was born in Miami in 1995. His parents divorced when he was four, he grew up with his mother and with his father nearby. When Trayvon was nine he pulled his injured dad out of an apartment on fire, saving his life. In middle school he worked to earn his own money and took to wearing a hooded sweatshirt and listening to music. Although interested in aviation and studying to become a pilot, Trayvon struggled in high school and was suspended multiple times. During one of these suspensions, in February 2012, he went to spend time with his father and his father’s fiancée, in their gated, interracial community in Sanford, Florida. He’d been there before and on the evening of February 26 left the house for a 7-Eleven where he bought Skittles and a drink.
As Trayvon walked back from the store, George Zimmerman, the local neighborhood watch captain, called 911 to report a “suspicious person.” The 911 operator told Zimmerman to stay in his vehicle, but he got out of his car and followed Trayvon, who was on the phone with his girlfriend. When Trayvon realized he was being followed, he ran. Zimmerman pursued but lost him. The two met up again in the dark, a struggle ensued, and Trayvon, 17 years-old and unarmed, ended up dead from a handgun bullet to the chest. There were no eyewitnesses.
When Zimmerman was released without charge, opposition began to mobilize. Two months later he was charged, only to be acquitted on grounds of self-defense though he both initiated the contact and shot Trayvon dead at close range. The verdict triggered protests across the country, the hoodie becoming a symbol of justice denied. Organizer Alicia Garza’s response was that “Black lives matter,” and a movement was born, a movement to “eradicate white supremacy and build local power to intervene in violence inflicted on Black communities by the state and vigilantes.” Trayvon’s high school classmates have compared his death to Emmett Till’s.
Leader: The Doctrine of Discovery was promulgated by 15th century Popes who believed that God intended European Catholics to own the world. Their Papal decrees declared war on the non-Christian world, authorizing the Kings of Spain and Portugal to invade, capture, vanquish, and subdue the pagans of Africa and the Americas, reducing them to perpetual slavery and taking away all their possessions, property and lands.
This Catholic supremacy became Christian supremacy and, by the 17th century, white supremacy. White men proclaimed themselves God’s chosen carriers of civilization, culture, and faith, and their superior application of organized violence won them the world.
All: Lord Jesus Christ, condemned with the Black world to crucifixion by white supremacy, have mercy on us, help us repent and live the gospel.
Station II: Jesus Carries His Cross
Leader: We adore You, O
Christ, and we praise You.
All: Because
by your holy cross You have redeemed the world.
J.W. Terrill:
My father was my mammy’s master. He was a old bachelor and run a saloon, and he was white, but my mammy was a Negro. He made her come and be his mistress one night every week. He would have kilt every one of his slaves rather than see us go free, ‘specially me and my mammy. He was mean to me.
Before my father gave me to his sister, he tied me to a tree and whipped me like a beast till I was unconscious and left me strapped to the tree all night in cold and rainy weather. Finally my father let his sister take me and raise me with her children, but before he let her have me he willed that I must wear a bell till I was twenty-one years old, strapped round my shoulders with the bell ‘bout three feet from my head in a steel frame. That was for punishment for being born into the world the son of a white man and my mammy, a Negro slave. I wears this frame with the bell where I couldn’t reach the clapper, day and night. I never knowed what it was like to lay down in bed and get a good night’s sleep till I was ‘bout seventeen years old, when my father died and my missy took the bell offen me.
My missy was pretty good to me when my father wasn’t right around. He wouldn’t let her give me anything to eat but cornbread and water and little sweet ‘taters, and just ‘nuf of that to keep me alive. I was always hungry. My mammy had a boy and a girl by her colored husband, but I never got to play with them. Missy worked me on the farm, and there was ‘bout one hundred acres and fifteen slaves to work ‘em. The overseer waked us ‘bout three in the morning, and then he worked us just long as we could see. If we didn’t git round fast ‘nuf, he chain us to a tree at night with nothing to eat, and next day, if we didn’t go on the run, he hit us thirty-nine licks with a belt, what was ‘bout three-foot-long and four inches wide.
I wore the bell night and day, and my father would chain me to a tree till I nearly died from the cold and being so hungry. I slept on a chair and tried to rest till my father died, and then I sang all day, ‘cause I knowed I wouldn’t be treated so mean. When Missy took the bell offen me, I think I in heaven ‘cause I could lie down and go to sleep. When I did I couldn’t wake up for a long time, and when I did wake up I’d be scared to death I’d see my father with his whip and that old bell. I’d jump out of bed and run till I give out, for fear he’d come back and git me.1
* * *
Twelve year-old Tamir Rice was described as a boisterous, friendly, prankster by his Cleveland elementary school friends—the whoopee cushion and the resealed, but empty, milk carton, his fortes. At family gatherings the 195 pound sixth grader would look after his smaller cousins and offer to run errands for the adults.
One day in November, 2015, Tamir borrowed a friends’ pellet gun that no longer had an orange tip on it to distinguish it from a real handgun. Soon afterward two white police officers responded to a 911 call that a man was wielding a gun and pointing at people at a nearby park. However, the emergency dispatcher failed to relay to the officers that the caller said that the individual was “probably a juvenile” and the gun was “probably fake.”
When the police car screeched to a stop within 8 feet of Tamir, an officer got out and in less than two seconds shot him in the abdomen.
The officers called for medical help seven times, but did nothing to help Tamir. When Tamir’s 14-year-old sister ran up to comfort him, she was tackled, handcuffed, and put in the back of the police cruiser. When his mother showed up they threatened to arrest her if she didn’t calm down. An FBI agent arrived four minutes after the shooting and tended to Tamir before medical help arrived in another four minutes. Tamir died the next day.
Leader: From George Washington to George Floyd, the struggle for racial justice has defined our nation. As the trial of George Floyd’s killer is underway, we gather to remember correctly the history and present reality of white barbarity, to repent of our complicity, and to dedicate ourselves to ensuring that Black Lives Matter.
All: Lord Jesus Christ, we pray for rest for the spirits of the enslaved people who built this country; they have blessed the world by their creativity, resistance, endurance, and survival.
Station III: Jesus Falls the First Time
Leader: We adore You, O Christ, and we praise You.
All: Because
by your holy cross You have redeemed the world.
Ben Simpson:
My father’s name was Roger Stielszen, and my mother’s name was Betty. Massa Earl Stielszen captures them in Africa and brings them to Georgia. He got kilt and my sister and me went to his son. His son was a killer. He got in trouble there in Georgia and got him two good-stepping hosses and the covered wagon. Then he chains all he slaves round the necks and fastens the chains to the hosses and makes them walk all the way to Texas. My mother and my sister had to walk. Emma was my sister. Somewhere on the road it went to snowing, and Massa wouldn’t let us wrap anything round our feet. We had to sleep on the ground, too, in all that snow.
Massa have a great long whip platted out of rawhide, and when one of us fall behind or give out, he hit him with that whip. It take the hide every time it hit. Mother, she gave out on the way, ‘bout the line of Texas. Her feet got raw and bleeding, and her legs swoll plumb out of shape. Then Massa, he just take out he gun and shot her, and whilst she lay dying he kicks her two-three times and says, “Damn a slave who can’t take nothing.” You know that man wouldn’t bury my mother, just leave her layin’ where he shot her at. You know, then there wasn’t no law ‘gainst killing slaves.
He come plumb to Austin through that snow. He taken up farming and changes he name to Alex Simpson and changes our names, too. He cut logs and builded he home on the side of them mountains. We never had no quarters. When nighttime come he locks the chain round our necks then locks it round a tree. Our bed were the ground. All he feed us was raw meat and green corn. I et many a green weed. I was hungry. He never let us eat at noon, he worked us all day without stopping. We went naked, that the way he worked us. We never had any clothes.
My sister, Emma, was the only woman he have till he marries. Emma was wife of all seven Negro slaves. He sold her when she’s ‘bout fifteen, just before her baby was born. I never seen her since.
Massa was a outlaw. He come to Texas and deal in stolen hosses. Just before he’s hung for stealin’ hosses, he marries a young Spanish gal. He sure mean to her. Whips her ‘cause she want him to leave he slaves alone and live right.
Long after war time he got hung. He didn’t let us free. We wore chains all the time. When we work, we drug them chains with us. At night he lock us to a tree to keep us from running off. He didn’t have to do that. We were afraid to run. We knew he’d kill us.
It was ‘bout three years after the war they hung him. Then Missy turned us a-loose.
I had a hard time then, too. All I had to eat is what I could find and steal. I was ‘fraid of everybody. I just went wild and to the woods.2
* * *
Last September, two San Clemente, California, “homeless liaison” police deputies debated in their squad car whether 42 year-old Kurt Andras Reinhold was jaywalking. The homeless outreach team they belonged to had the job to "assist the homeless population and provide them with access to available resources and services while protecting the quality of life for the citizens of Orange County through proactive enforcement." Reinhold had been offered services by the team within the last 30 days.
The two officers, trained in crisis intervention and de-escalation techniques, confronted Reinhold, who contested their claim that he had jaywalked and refused to obey their commands, swatting away the hand of one deputy who kept touching him. Soon they took him to the ground by the side of the road. In the scuffle Reinhold’s hand slid down near the holstered gun of one of the deputies who falsely shouted, “He’s got my gun!” The other officer then shot Reinhold twice, killing him.
Leader: Anti-Black racism is 400 years of sin baked into our institutions and our brain stems, residing deep in our national subconscious and on the tip of our tongues. One searing consequence is that Black people (unarmed or armed) are three times as likely as white people to be killed by police.
All: Lord Jesus Christ, with Black America, you bear racism’s weight. Bring justice, healing, life and strength to Black communities here in Norfolk and across the country.
Station IV: Jesus Meets His Mother
Leader: We adore You, O Christ, and praise You.
All: Because
by your holy cross You have redeemed the world.
Frederick Douglass:
Between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide, that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one, is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land.
Indeed, I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity. I look upon it as the climax of all misnomers, the boldest of all frauds, and the grossest of all libels. Never was there a clearer case of “stealing the attire of the court of heaven to serve the devil in.” I am filled with unutterable loathing when I contemplate the religious pomp and show, together with the horrible inconsistencies, which everywhere surround me. We have men-stealers for ministers, women-whippers for missionaries, and cradle-plunderers for church members. The man who wields the blood-clotted cowskin during the week fills the pulpit on Sunday, and claims to be a minister of the meek and lowly Jesus. The man who robs me of my earnings at the end of each week meets me as a class leader on Sunday morning, to show me the way of life, and the path of salvation. He who sells my sister, for purposes of prostitution, stands forth as the pious advocate of purity. He who proclaims it a religious duty to read the Bible denies me the right of learning to read the name of the God who made me. He who is the religious advocate of marriage robs whole millions of its sacred influence, and leaves them to the ravages of wholesale pollution. The warm defender of the sacredness of the family relation is the same that scatters whole families—sundering husbands and wives, parents and children, sisters and brothers—leaving the hut vacant, and the hearth desolate. We see the thief preaching against theft, and the adulterer against adultery. We have men sold to build churches, women sold to support the gospel, and babes sold to purchase Bibles for the poor heathen! All for the glory of God and the good of souls! The slave auctioneer’s bell and the church-going bell chime in with each other, and the bitter cries of the heart-broken slave are drowned in the religious shouts of his pious master. Revivals of religion and revivals in the slave-trade go hand in hand together. The slave prison and the church stand near each other. The clanking of fetters and the rattling of chains in the prison, and the pious psalm and solemn prayer in the church, may be heard at the same time. The dealers in the bodies and souls of men erect their stand in the presence of the pulpit, and they mutually help each other. The dealer gives his blood-stained gold to support the pulpit, and the pulpit, in return, covers his infernal business with the garb of Christianity. Here we have religion and robbery the allies of each other—devils dressed in angels’ robes, and hell presenting the semblance of paradise.3
Leader: Jesus, your mother met you on your journey to Golgotha. White America sold enslaved Black mothers from their children, and children away from their mothers, plumbing the very depths of sadism for profit, proudly invoking you as cover.
All: Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on us and help us know in our heart of hearts that every Black person is created in the image and likeness of God, replete with dignity, a sacred vessel of the divine life. Guide us in spending our lives working for the common good, for the repair of a nation founded in racism.
Station V: Simon of Cyrene Helps Jesus to Carry His Cross
Leader: We adore You, O Christ, and we praise You.
All: Because
by your holy cross You have redeemed the world.
In May of 1918, Hampton Smith was a 25-year-old white plantation owner in Brooks County, Georgia, known for abusing and beating his workers. Few people in the area would work for him so he turned to leasing convicts—he would pay the fines of Black people accused of made up crimes and then require them to work off the debt at his farm. Nineteen-year-old Sydney Johnson, arrested for "playing dice" and fined thirty dollars, was one such unfortunate person.
After a few days of work on Smith's plantation, Smith not only refused to pay Johnson some earned wages but also savagely beat him for refusing to work while sick. Sidney Johnson then shot and killed Hampton Smith. A mob driven manhunt ensued for Johnson and for other Black farmworkers who Smith had abused and the mob accused of conspiracy. The manhunt lasted more than a week and left at least 13 people dead. Black men were hung near the local Black church in Morven, found in the river, or just disappeared.
One of those hung was Hayes Turner. Smith had beaten Turner’s wife, Mary, in the past, after which Turner threatened Smith and ended up sentenced to a chain gang. After Turner’s lynching, Mary, 33 years-old and 8 months pregnant, publicly objected to her husband’s murder and threatened to swear out warrants for his killers. Though the threat was empty as Blacks had no recourse to the courts, she had to flee. She was caught and taken to Folsom’s Bridge on the Lowndes County line, where the mob tied her by the ankles, hung her upside down from a tree, poured gasoline over her, and burned off her clothes. She was still alive when a member of the mob cut her stomach open with a butcher knife and her unborn child dropped to the ground where it cried twice before being stomped to death. Her body was then riddled with hundreds of bullets. She and her baby were buried ten feet away from where they were murdered, the site marked by a whiskey bottle.
Three days later Sydney Johnson was killed in a shoot-out with police in Valdosta. Once killed, a crowd of more than 700 people cut off his genitals and threw them into the street. A rope was then tied to his neck and his body was drug for nearly 20 miles to the Black church grounds in Morven. There, what remained of his body was hung and burned. During and shortly after this chain of events more than 500 people fled Lowndes and Brooks Counties in fear for their lives.
Black newspapers were outraged at the grotesque murder of Turner and her baby. White newspapers failed to mention she was pregnant. No one was ever held accountable.
In 2010 the Georgia State Historical Society erected a marker memorializing “Mary Turner and the Lynching Rampage.” The plaque was taken down late last year pending reinstallation as it had some 27 bullet holes in it and had been struck multiple times by a vehicle.
* * *
Sandra Bland was from Illinois, the second youngest of five sisters. At ten she became active in the church and began playing the trombone. After graduating high school, she attended Prairie View A&M University on a marching band scholarship. She completed a degree in agriculture and moved back to Illinois. At 28 years-old, on July 9, 2015 she traveled back to Texas for a job interview at Prairie A&M and was hired as their community outreach coordinator.
The next day, Bland returned to Prairie View to fill out some paperwork. Shortly after leaving the university, she was pulled over by a white state trooper for changing lanes without signaling. The officer ordered her to extinguish her cigarette, she refused, and he ordered her out of the car. She questioned him and he drew his stun gun. After a struggle on the shoulder of the road Bland was handcuffed and taken to jail on suspicion of felony assault on a public servant.
Over the next three days Bland made several phone calls from jail to family and friends. The morning of July 13, police reported Sandra Bland had used a plastic bag to hang herself in her cell. The sheriff said that during her booking Bland stated that she had previously attempted suicide, but she was not placed under suicide watch. Her friends and family insisted that Bland was not depressed or suicidal but simply angry about being in jail and the circumstances surrounding her arrest.
Leader: Simon helped carry Jesus’ cross.
All: Lord Jesus Christ, white supremacy has meant four centuries of Black people as the national scapegoat. Help us grow in solidarity with those at the blunt end of state and vigilante violence, whatever the cost, out of love for people we know.
Station VI: Veronica Wipes the Face of Jesus
Leader: We adore You, O Christ, and we praise You.
All: Because
by your holy cross You have redeemed the world.
James Cone:
The cross is a paradoxical religious symbol because it inverts the world’s value system, proclaiming that hope comes by way of defeat, that suffering and death do not have the last word, that the last shall be first and the first last. Secular intellectuals find this idea absurd, but it is profoundly real in the spiritual life of Black folk. For many who were tortured and lynched, the crucified Christ often manifested God’s loving and liberating presence within the great contradictions of Black life. The cross of Jesus is what empowered Black Christians to believe, ultimately, that they would not be defeated by the “troubles of the world,” no matter how great and painful their suffering. Only people stripped of power could understand this absurd claim of faith. The cross was God’s critique of power—white power—with powerless love, snatching victory from the jaws of defeat.
Present-day Christians misinterpret the cross when they make it a non-offensive religious symbol, a decorative object in their homes and churches. The cross, therefore, needs the lynching tree to remind us what it means when we say that God is revealed in Jesus at Golgotha, the place of the skull, on the cross where criminals and rebels against the Roman state were executed. The lynching tree is America’s cross. What happened to Jesus in Jerusalem happened to Blacks in Arkansas, Mississippi, and Kentucky. Lynched Black bodies are symbols of Christ’s body. If we want to understand what the crucifixion means for Americans today, we must view it through the lens of mutilated Black bodies whose lives are destroyed in the criminal justice system. Jesus continues to be lynched before our eyes. He is crucified wherever people are tormented. That is why I say Christ is Black.4
Leader: Whiteness, as the supreme social construct of the world, is a criminal enterprise. White Americans built systems based on the demonization, rape, torture, plunder and murder, of Black people. At the same time, white people disavow accountability for racism, promoting a myth of white innocence. As James Baldwin wrote, “it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.”
All: Lord Jesus Christ, as Veronica wiped your face, help us willingly cleanse our own and each-others’ vision to clearly see racism. Give us the grace to acknowledge the personal benefits and privileges of whiteness and the personal and collective courage to make restitution.
Station VII: Jesus Falls a Second Time
Leader: We adore You, O Christ, and we praise You.
All: Because
by your holy cross You have redeemed the world.
One hundred years ago next month, on May 30, 1921, the Greenwood District of Tulsa, Oklahoma, was home to one of the wealthiest Black populations in the country. Called the “Black Wall Street,” the neighborhood claimed a number of millionaires and scores of prosperous Black-owned businesses. Within two days, all of it would be burned to the ground.
It began when Dick Rowland, a Black teenage shoeshine, entered a downtown elevator on his way to the closest segregated bathroom. He most likely tripped and stepped on the foot of white teenage elevator operator Sarah Page and her scream sent him running. The police were called, and though Page didn’t want to press charges, Rowland was arrested.
The next afternoon the Tulsa Tribune reported that Rowland had attempted to rape Page. That evening whites surrounded the courthouse where Rowland was held and demanded that the sheriff hand him over. Armed Black World War I veterans went to offer the sheriff their services to defend Rowland from being lynched but were turned away. As they were leaving a white man tried to disarm one of the veterans and a shot was fired. Whites fired on the Blacks and rolling gun battles began.
The authorities deputized and armed hundreds of white men, and while whites executed drive by shootings in Greenwood’s residential neighborhoods and began to set fires along the edges of the commercial district, the National Guard mobilized to protect white neighborhoods. The next day at daybreak whites invaded Greenwood, plundering homes and businesses before setting them on fire and gunning down fleeing residents. Private airplanes were used to hurl turpentine bombs onto the roofs of black homes and businesses, marking the first aerial attack on US soil. Additional Guard troops participated in the carnage and burning and helped round up all the Black people who hadn’t escaped town to put them into detention camps. Black bodies were buried in mass graves. Greenwood was smoldering rubble.
As many as 300 people were killed, mostly Black. More than 35 blocks were destroyed, over 1,200 homes. 6000 Blacks were held, all 10,000 made homeless. No one was convicted on charges for the murders, injuries, or property destruction endured by the Black community. Whites sent postcards to friends and family with pictures of charred Black corpses and smoke blackened skies.
Though the white establishment denied $4 million in Black compensatory claims, offered no help, and tried to use the courts to force their relocation, the Black community soon began the long process of rebuilding Greenwood. Thousands spent the next winter living in tents. For years to come black women would see white women walking down the street wearing their jewelry and snatch them back.
Between the Civil War and the Civil Rights movement whites attacked some 3000 Black communities across the country, burning, looting, and killing or forcing out their inhabitants.
Oliva Hooker, the last known Tulsa survivor, several months before dying at 103 years- old, remembered the violence that ripped apart her peaceful Greenwood community, when looters broke into her home as she and her siblings hid under the dining table. “I used to scream at night,” she said. “It took me years to get over the shock of seeing people be so horrible to people who had done them no wrong.”
* * *
Ohio is an open carry state, where legally owned weapons can be carried in public. In August of 2014, 22 year-old William Crawford III picked up an unpackaged BB gun that was on sale at a Wal-Mart store outside of Dayton, and continued shopping. Crawford, a father of two, had, despite frequently changing schools, graduated from high school two years earlier and worked odd jobs through a temp agency as a telemarketer and laborer.
Another Wal-Mart customer called 911, falsely reporting that Crawford was waving the gun around and pointing it at children. When police arrived there were no signs of panic in the store. Crawford was on his cellphone with his children’s mother in the pet supply aisle and if any verbal commands were made he didn’t hear them before an officer shot twice and killed him.
Another customer died of a heart attack while fleeing the shooting.
Immediately following the shooting, Crawford’s girlfriend, Tasha Thomas, was aggressively questioned by police, who didn’t tell her he was dead. She sobbed as she swore he didn’t go to the store with a gun. The interrogator accused her of lying and threatened her with jail time. She died in a car crash a few months later.
Leader: Jesus, you were the new Moses, leading people out of physical and spiritual slavery. The cross was your instrument of liberation, revealing God as one with every crucified people through history, all those enslaved, exploited, or colonized.
All: Lord Jesus Christ, white median family wealth is as much as 50 times that of the median Black family. As the cross weighed you down, so have whites crushed Black America by crippling their economic opportunity and wealth building through exclusion, violence, fraud, theft, and standard business practices.
Station VIII: Jesus Meets the Women of Jerusalem
Leader: We adore You, O Christ, and we praise You.
All: Because
by your holy cross You have redeemed the world.
Douglas Blackmon:
The 13th Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1865, prohibited slavery and involuntary servitude, but explicitly exempted those convicted of crime. In response, Southern state legislatures quickly passed “Black Codes”—new laws enforced only against Black people subjecting them to criminal prosecution for bogus offenses such as loitering, breaking curfew, having weapons, and not carrying proof of employment. States also passed laws allowing prisoners to be leased to private industry to labor for free. The codes let whites arrest Blacks at will, cementing white supremacy in the post-war south.
Blacks detained under such unjust charges would go before kangaroo courts and be fined. Unable to pay, local businessmen and landowners would pay the fines in their stead and force the Black prisoners to work off their debt over months or years at their cotton, sugar or rice plantation, turpentine forest, lumber camp, railroad gang, or coal mine.
The convict leasing system continued until the 1940’s re-enslaving hundreds of thousands of Black men, and some women and children, who were imprisoned at labor sites rather than in jails. Subjected to relentless back-breaking labor, squalid living conditions, poor medical treatment, scant food and frequent floggings, tens of thousands died. Convict leasers were even less likely than enslavers to care about the fate of their laborers—enslaved people could cost $1000 while a convict could be replaced for $20.
One such prisoner was John Clarke. On April 11, 1903, he was convicted of “gaming,” and, unable to pay, was leased to one of the many mines outside of Birmingham, Alabama. Working off the fine would take him 10 days, but fees for the sheriff, the county clerk and the witnesses who testified against him required that he serve an additional 104 days in the mines. One month and three days later, he was dead, crushed by falling rock.
For a quarter century, up to 1920, Tennessee Coal, Iron, and Railroad Co., leased all of Alabama’s state prisoners, driving 1000 Black convicts under the whip at the Pratt mines. There the men worked in pools of putrid water that seeped out of the rock and was contaminated by mineral residues and the prisoners’ body wastes, but was often the only available drinking water. Waves of dysentery and diarrhea swept through the mines claiming lives while gas from headlamps and smoke from dynamite blasts and gunpowder choked the air. Methane and carbon dioxide accumulated and exploded. Amid the bestial conditions rape and murder were commonplace. Once a day a food bucket came by, a handful of it thrown on each coal shovel. Clothing just disintegrated and was seldom replaced.
Private guards who staffed the slave labor mines were brutal and often inebriated. They used water tortures, hung prisoners by their thumbs or ankles, and men who failed to meet their quotas (from one to four tons of coal a day) were often whipped until skin literally fell from their backs. Those who tried to escape were restrained like their enslaved forbears by shackles, ball and chain, iron cuffs or collars.
Before dawn each day, the convicts would leave the Pratt Mines stockade and go down into the mines, resurfacing to lockdown after dark. Only on Sundays, when mining ceased for a day, would the men see sunlight.
Those who died, if unclaimed by relatives, were quickly thrown into mass graves adjacent to the mines or incinerated in one of the company’s coke ovens. The men who made it out alive were often physically and mentally shattered. The state of Alabama made as much as an eighth of its entire annual budget from leasing its convicts.5
* * *
Ramarley Graham was an 18-year-old student at the Young Scholars Academy of the Bronx where he aspired to travel the world and become a veterinarian. In February of 2012 he was spotted adjusting the waistband of his pants during a NYPD narcotics squad surveillance of a bodega near his home. When plainclothes officers approached Graham, they reported that he ran to the home of Patricia Hartley, his grandmother, a few blocks away. Surveillance footage from the house shows Graham calmly walking up to the door and entering without urgency. Two officers run up close behind, guns drawn.
Eventually police enter the rear and the front of the home. One officer ran upstairs to Hartley’s apartment, broke down the door without a search warrant or announcing that he was a police officer, ran into the apartment and discovered Graham in the bathroom attempting to flush a bag of marijuana down the toilet. Without any orders to comply, Graham was shot once in the chest in front of his little brother and his grandmother. He was taken to the hospital and pronounced dead.
Patricia Hartley was arrested, detained, and for the next seven hours questioned by NYPD at the local precinct. Graham’s body was misidentified after his death, which prevented his parents from seeing his body for four days after his murder.
Leader: As women following him mourned and lamented, Jesus told them, “Do not weep for me, weep instead for yourselves and for your children.” Even the enslaver Thomas Jefferson said, “Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.”
All: What will be the outcome of the hell of white history rife with violence against Black bodies, their labor stolen, their humanity belittled?
Station IX: Jesus Falls a Third Time
Leader: We adore You, O Christ, and we praise You.
All: Because
by your holy cross You have redeemed the world.
James Cone:
Cain killed his brother. Abel’s blood spoke. Then the Lord said to Cain, “Where is your brother Abel?” He said, “I don’t know, am I my brother’s keeper?” And the Lord said, “What have you done? Listen, your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground!”
Cain can be seen as a metaphor for white people and Abel for Black people. God is asking white Americans, especially Christians, “Where are your Black brothers and sisters?” The whites respond, “We don’t know. Are we their keeper?”
And the Lord said, “What have you done to them for four centuries?”
The blood of Black people is crying out to God and to whites from the ground of the United States of America. The blood of Trayvon Martin, Oscar Grant, Jordan Davis, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Tamir Rice. The blood of Denise McNabb, Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley, and Addie Mae Collins. The blood of Emmet Till, and the nearly 6000 lynched Blacks. The blood of Nat Turner, Denmark Vesey, and Gabriel Prosser, and the many millions gone on the auction block, under the lash, and during the Middle Passage.
Black blood is crying out to God from the ground all over this land. Is anybody listening?
Leader: Jesus falls with impoverished and vulnerable Black Americans who have been kept from full participation in the life of this country.
All: Lord Jesus Christ, give us ears to hear the spilled blood of Black people crying out from the ground, as well as the living Black voices all around us. May they transform our lives.
Station X: Jesus is Stripped
Leader: We adore You, O Christ, and we praise You.
All: Because
by your holy cross You have redeemed the world.
Patrisse Khan-Cullors:
The police helicopters sound closer than usual, and I speculate that this summer afternoon in 2013 they are coming into our Village, St. Elmo’s, a collection of cottages in mid-city Los Angeles where artists and organizers of color have lived and taught art to the community since the 1960’s. This is my home, the first place where I have felt wholly safe, the place where I have felt whole.
I tell JT, my friend and an artist who is visiting my home with his six-year-old daughter, Nia Imani, that my Black Lives Matter work as well as my demanding that the local sheriff’s department be held accountable has made us very unpopular with law enforcement.
The helicopters now sound overhead. The three of us feel like small prey beneath a hawk. We still ourselves in a corner of the cottage. The helicopters seem like the loudest things we’ve ever heard. Are they even searching for anyone or is this just another reminder to us that we are a people under siege? One thing never told about California is the story of occupation, of what it means for so many of us who are Black or Latinx to live unable to escape the constant monitoring by police, the idea that your very existence, the brown of your skin, is enough to get you snatched up, enough to get you killed.
JT and I whisper with the helicopters hovering and the six-year-old terrified but we aren’t able to explain things to her nor can we say nothing at all. Finally I say, “We’re being still right now,” and JT, trying to comfort, whispers in my ear, “Maybe they are not coming for you this time.” We pause and then he says what we both know: of course that would mean they’re about to swoop down in another Black or Brown corner of the city, one of the many areas designated as an urban jungle, a place behind enemy lines and ground zero in the war on drugs.
When the banging on the door begins I tell JT to wait there. I cannot let him be the one to answer. I know his dark-skinned, six-foot-four, 200-plus pound frame will present as an opportunity, an excuse for violence.
As the banging continues, I hug JT’s small, dark chocolate girl, an emerging artist—she loves to paint. Nia Imani and I have built a special connection. I tell her everything will be fine. I crack the front door just enough to slip outside. Know Your Rights workshops have long drilled into me not to let police in if they don’t have a warrant, which I don’t believe they do. We have done nothing wrong, have not harmed a single person nor advocated for it. They have no right to be here!
Even still, I am shaking, I am terrified. Outside my door there are at least a dozen police in full riot gear. I am a single woman, unarmed and five feet two. Every single one of the people standing before me, their faces disguised by helmets, their bodies shielded in Kevlar, has a weapon trained on me or on my home.
A Latinx officer is the one who engages me. “Someone tried to shoot up the station, we think he may be hiding in one of the Village cottages.”
“No one is here,” I say.
“Why are you shaking then?” He pushes, aggressive but not nasty.
“Because your guns are pointed at me. Because all these guns are pointed at my home,” I say, and gesture with my eyes and not with my arms, another lesson from Know Your Rights.
“There’s no one here you’re looking for.”
I open the door and re-enter. And back inside JT grabs me and hugs me and together we try to breathe.
Minutes pass. The banging on the front door begins again and we are told that we must come out.
JT and I look at one another and at his tiny six-year-old girl. I wonder, is this how it ends for her, for us? I don’t say this, of course. What we do say to one another is that we need to get out of this alive. We say that situations much less charged than this have resulted in needless death.
We decide that JT and Nia Imani exiting first followed by me is the safest way to leave. We pray that they will not harm a father and daughter but we know that if at any moment JT is alone, they will kill him.
I call out, “My friend is here with his six-year-old daughter, they are coming out first.” They walk out. I follow.
Immediately, the police surround the three of us, who are not armed and are dressed like three people who were sitting in their house and planning out their day, which is what we had been doing when we first heard the helicopters.
Ten, maybe a dozen, cops force us at gunpoint—and by we, I mean also six-year old Nia Imani—into the courtyard in front of our cottage while the others swarm past us and enter my home like angry hornets. They are in my home for hours.
We have not been given a search warrant and we cannot protest. We are being held at gunpoint the entire time and are mostly blocked from watching what they do inside my home, what they take, what they leave.
After three or four hours, without another word to us, they finally leave.
After that, I move out.6
* * *
Breonna Taylor was the daughter of a single mother and a father who had been in jail since she was six years-old. After high school and a brief college stint, she became an EMT and then a patient care assistant at a rehab, tending to people recovering from traumatic injuries. Breona took in her younger sister and infant goddaughter and inspired them, as well as her colleagues at work, with her enthusiasm and loveable nature. 2020 was a year of big plans for the 26-year-old: Her home was plastered with Post-it notes on which she wrote her goals. She had just bought a new car. Next on the list: buying her own home. And trying to have a baby with her new boyfriend. They had already chosen a name.
On the night of March 13, the police, who were looking for her ex-boyfriend’s drugs and money, had been instructed to conduct a “knock and announce” entry. The plainclothes officers were to make loud and clear they were police and give Breonna time to respond—they expected to be met by a single unarmed woman.
But her new boyfriend was with her that night, and when the banging on the door woke them and they screamed for the intruders to identify themselves, they heard no response. When a battering ram smashed the door off its hinges, the boyfriend, thinking it was Breonna’s ex, fired a shot from his legally registered firearm that hit an officer in the leg. Thirty-two bullets answered, six hitting and killing Breonna.
Leader: As Jesus is stripped and crucified naked at a crossroads, Black America has been subjected to 400 years of humiliation and violence at white hands.
All: Lord Jesus Christ, heal our blindness to racism in ourselves and our systems, our deafness to cries for equal justice, and our muteness when we need to speak up for racial equity. Help us to stand against the crucifixion of our Black brothers and sisters.
Station XI: Jesus is Nailed to the Cross
Leader: We adore You, O Christ, and we praise You.
All: Because
by your holy cross You have redeemed the world.
Ian Manuel:
In the summer of 1990, shortly after finishing seventh grade, I was directed by a few older kids to commit a robbery. During the botched attempt, I shot a woman. She suffered serious injuries to her jaw and mouth but survived. It was reckless and foolish on my part, the act of a 13-year-old in crisis, and I’m simply grateful no one died.
For this I was arrested and charged as an adult with armed robbery and attempted murder. My court-appointed lawyer advised me to plead guilty, telling me that the maximum sentence would be 15 years. So I did. But my sentence wasn’t 15 years—it was life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.
I was thrown into solitary confinement the day I arrived at the state prison in Lake Butler, Florida, because of my young age. Three weeks in, I was transferred to the general population of a different prison. But a year and a half later, at age 15, I was put back into solitary confinement after being written up for a few minor infractions.
I had no idea that I would be in isolation for the next 18 years.
Florida has different levels of solitary confinement; I spent the majority of that time in one of the most restrictive. Nearly two decades caged in a 7-by-10-foot room passed before I was rotated between the general population area and solitary for six more years. I was finally released from prison in 2016.
For 18 years I didn’t have a window in my room to distract myself from the intensity of my confinement. I wasn’t permitted to talk to my fellow prisoners or even to myself. I didn’t have healthy, nutritious food; I was given just enough to not die.
Because solitary confinement is hidden from public view and the broader prison population, egregious abuses are left unchecked. I watched a corrections officer spray a blind prisoner in the face with chemicals simply because he was standing by the door of his cell as a female nurse walked by. I also witnessed the human consequences of the harshness of solitary firsthand: Some people would resort to cutting their stomachs open with a razor and sticking a plastic spork inside their intestines just so they could spend a week in the comfort of a hospital room with a television. Just so they could have a semblance of freedom. Just so they could feel human again.
On occasion, I purposely overdosed on Tylenol so that I could spend a night in the hospital. For even one night, it was worth the pain.
One time I was told I’d be switching dorms, and I politely asked to remain where I was because a guard in the new area had been overly aggressive with me. In response, four or five officers handcuffed me, picked me up by my feet and shoulders, and marched with me to my new dorm—using my head to ram the four steel doors on the way there. When we reached my new cell, they dropped me face-first onto the concrete floor. Cheek pressed to the cold concrete, I lay there, staring at the blank wall, shaking in fear and pain. I couldn’t believe I was still alive.
I served 18 consecutive years in isolation because each minor disciplinary infraction— like having a magazine that had another prisoner’s name on the mailing label—added an additional six months to my time in solitary confinement. Before I knew it, months in solitary bled into years, years into almost two decades.
As a child, I survived these conditions by conjuring up stories of what I’d do when I was finally released. My mind was the only place I found freedom from my reality—the only place I could play basketball with my brother or video games with my friends, and eat my mother’s warm cherry pie on the porch. It was the only place I could simply be a kid.
I witnessed too many people lose their minds while isolated. They’d involuntarily cross a line and simply never return to sanity. Perhaps they didn’t want to. Staying in their mind was the better, safer, more humane option.7
* * *
Bryan Stevenson:
The United States has the highest rate of incarceration of any nation on Earth: We represent 4 percent of the planet’s population but 22 percent of its imprisoned. In the early 1970s, our prisons held fewer than 300,000 people; since then, that number has grown to more than 2.2 million, with 4.5 million more on probation or parole. Because of mandatory sentencing and “three strikes” laws, I’ve found myself representing clients sentenced to life without parole for stealing a bicycle or for simple possession of marijuana. And central to understanding this practice of mass incarceration and excessive punishment is the legacy of slavery.
The 13th Amendment is credited with ending slavery, but it stopped short of that: It made an exception for those convicted of crimes. After emancipation, Black people, once seen as less than fully human “slaves,” were seen as less than fully human “criminals.” Brutal laws governing slavery were replaced with Black Codes governing free black people—making the criminal justice system central to new strategies of racial control.
Anything that challenged the racial hierarchy could be seen as a crime, punished either by the law or by the lynchings that stretched from Mississippi to Minnesota. It’s not just that this history fostered a view of Black people as presumptively criminal. It also cultivated a tolerance for employing any level of brutality in response.
This appetite for harsh punishment has echoed across the decades. Late in the 20th century, amid protests over civil rights and inequality, a new politics of fear and anger would emerge. Nixon’s war on drugs, mandatory minimum sentences, three-strikes laws, children tried as adults, “broken windows” policing—these policies were not as expressly racialized as the Black Codes, but their implementation has been essentially the same. It is black and brown people who are disproportionately targeted, stopped, suspected, incarcerated and shot by the police.
Hundreds of years after the arrival of enslaved Africans, a presumption of danger and criminality still follows black people everywhere. New language has emerged for the non-crimes that have replaced the Black Codes: driving while black, sleeping while black, sitting in a coffee shop while Black. All reflect incidents in which African-Americans were mistreated, assaulted or arrested for conduct that would be ignored if they were white. In schools, Black kids are suspended and expelled at rates that vastly exceed the punishment of white children for the same behavior.
Inside courtrooms, the problem gets worse. Racial disparities in sentencing are found in almost every crime category. Children as young as 13, almost all black, are sentenced to life imprisonment for non-homicide offenses. Black defendants are 22 times more likely to receive the death penalty for crimes whose victims are white, rather than Black—a type of bias the Supreme Court has declared “inevitable.”
The smog created by our history of racial injustice is suffocating and toxic. We are too practiced in ignoring the victimization of any Black people tagged as criminal. Too many Americans are willing spectators to horrifying acts as long as we’re assured they’re in the interest of maintaining order.8
All: Lord Jesus Christ, as a result of centuries of opportunities denied, you are nailed to the cross day after day with Black Americans in jails and prisons, still segregated and subpar housing and schools, obstructed voting booths, poorer healthcare outcomes, disproportionate COVID deaths, and on streets awash in despair, drugs and guns. You command white America to give up its hoarded political and economic power, and build a national ethos of total equality.
Station XII: Jesus Dies on the Cross
Leader: We adore You, O Christ, and we praise
You.
All: Because by your holy cross You
have redeemed the world.
Elijah McClain was one of Sheneen McClain’s six children, whom she moved from Denver to Aurora, Colorado to get away from gang violence. Elijah was a quiet and introverted child and after being bullied in school was homeschooled. Intelligent and creative, he taught himself to draw and to play guitar and violin.
Elijah worked at a pizza chain before becoming a massage therapist. He often spent his lunch breaks at local animal shelters, playing violin for cats and dogs because he believed music would help soothe their anxiety. Those who knew him describe him as gentle: “I don’t even think he would set a mouse trap if there was a rodent problem,” said one friend.
Elijah had anemia, like many of his family members, so he often felt cold and wore layers of clothes and a mask. Another friend believed that his mask wearing not only helped him manage his chronic chill but his social anxiety as well. “It made him more comfortable being in the outside world,” she said. “He was the sweetest, purest person I have ever met. He was definitely a light in a whole lot of darkness.”
On Saturday night, August 24, 2019, 23-year-old Elijah put on a ski mask, popped his earbuds in, connected them to his phone, and went to a nearby convenience store to get his brother an iced tea. A passerby who observed Elijah called 911 to report a suspicious person in a mask, waving his arms around—but not armed, and not threatening.
Responding to the call, an officer approached Elijah and ordered him to stop walking. After several commands Elijah stopped but said he had the right to walk home. The officer responded by saying that he had the right to stop Elijah for looking suspicious, and he grabbed Elijah by the arms. As two more officers approached, Elijah said, “I am an introvert, please respect the boundaries that I am speaking. Leave me alone.”
The officers eventually brought him to the ground, claiming he had reached for one of their guns while they were pinning him against a wall to handcuff him.
The police used pain compliance techniques and restraints on Elijah from the first moments of the encounter until he was taken away on a gurney 18 minutes later. These included arm bars that dislocated his shoulder, wrist locks, and officers applying their knees to his large arm and leg muscle groups and joints. At one point an officer put Elijah in a carotid hold, causing him to pass out. The officers sat and kneeled on him, one threatened to have a dog bite him.
Most of this treatment occurred after Elijah was handcuffed and lying on the ground. He
cried out in pain, apologized, vomited, and spoke incoherently. He became increasingly plaintive and desperate as he struggled to breathe. He told officers that his name was Elijah McClain, and that “I’m an introvert and I’m different. Going home…That’s all I was doing. I’m so sorry.”
Overhearing an officer describing him by radio to a dispatcher as “still fighting,” Elijah said, “I don’t do any fighting. Why are you attacking me? I don’t believe in guns. I don’t even kill flies. I don’t eat meat. I don’t judge people for anything…I respect all life. Forgive me. All I was trying to do was become better…You all are phenomenal, you are beautiful...Forgive me.”
When Emergency Medical Services arrived, rather than talk to and examine 5 foot 7, 140 pound Elijah as he cried in pain, vomited, and struggled to breathe, they just observed. After a minute during which Elijah neither moved nor made a sound, they administered a tranquilizer dose calculated for a man 50 pounds heavier.
Elijah’s limp body was placed on a gurney, and while medics tried to save his life during the ambulance ride, he had a heart attack on the way to the hospital. Three days later Elijah was declared brain dead and on August 30 his family took his bruise-covered body off of life support.
Jesus Dies; Kneel; Moment of Silence
Speaking to the media, Sheneen McClain said, “I thank God that he was my son because just him being born brought life into my world, you know what I mean? I know he was giving life to other people too.”
Station XIII: Jesus is Taken Down from the Cross
Leader: We adore you, O Christ, and we praise you.
All: Because
by your holy cross You have redeemed the world.
Elie Mystal:
George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police in broad daylight this Memorial Day weekend. We know he was murdered because a video shows Floyd handcuffed and pinned under the knee of an officer who was crushing his throat into the pavement. Floyd could be heard telling the officer that he couldn’t breathe. He could be heard telling the officer, “Don’t kill me.” Onlookers were heard begging the officer to stop killing the man.
The police didn’t stop. The police are never going to voluntarily stop killing Black and Brown people. The killings will continue until the majority of white people in this country make the killings stop.
The police work for white people, and they know it. White people know it too. Deep down, white people know exactly whom the police are supposed to protect and serve, and they damn well know it’s not Black and Brown people.
It doesn’t have to be this way. It is entirely within the scope of white power in America to rein in its police. White people could elect mayors and prosecutors who are committed to police reform. White judges and juries could hold the police accountable for their crimes. White Republicans could challenge and eventually break the power of police unions just as easily as they break teachers’ unions or any labor union that stands in the way of rapacious capitalism. If a majority of white people decided, today, that racist policing should end, we’d start seeing changes to police forces by the middle of next week.
But white people do not stop their cops. A majority of them clearly want the cops to behave this way. They want the viciousness. They want the horror. Why? One day they might be alone in a park around a strange Black man, and what might happen then? Best to keep brutal, dangerous, and racist cops around, because, hey, you never know…
Most Black people know what happens when cops are given power, but we can’t get 51 percent of white people to do anything about it. We can’t get the white people who are willing to gather in large crowds to enjoy a spring day to gather in a large crowd to protest at City Hall.
Why would they? White people are not ignorant, and they’re not blind. They see the racial bias in policing, and they know that bias benefits them. They know they’re not going to catch a beatdown for not wearing a mask. They know they’re not going to be choked to death on the street in broad daylight. They know that having racist police officers around gives them incredible power, and power makes people feel good, even if they never use it. I’ve been in rooms where I’ve heard white people congratulate themselves for not calling the cops on some Black person, as if declining the option to use terrorism against a black person was some kind of proof of liberal good faith.
Black people have tried, again and again, to end the horror of police brutality against us. We march, we protest, we educate, we vote. We teach our children a special set of rules. We produce art and literature and music documenting our pain. We start organizations and movements. And yet we can’t achieve structural change in policing because a majority of white America always sets its will against us. White people in our own communities, our alleged friends and neighbors, consistently vote and act in ways that empower the police and ignore their brutality against us.
White people could put their police dogs on a leash. But they won’t. And more Black and Brown people will get mauled and killed until white people decide to do better.9
* * *
George Floyd grew up in Houston’s Cuney Homes public housing neighborhood. Larcenia Floyd invested her hopes in her son, who as a second-grader wrote that he dreamed of being a U.S. Supreme Court justice. In high school he was an atypical football star who people called ‘Big Friendly.’ He went to college and played basketball for three years before returning to Houston and his mother’s apartment to work in construction and security.
Between 1997 and 2005, Floyd was arrested several times on drug and theft charges, spending months in jail. In January 2013, almost 40 years old after finishing a five-year sentence for robbery with a firearm, he returned home and became a mentor for young men in the neighborhood. In one video he counsels, “I’ve got my shortcomings and my flaws and I ain’t better than nobody else, but, man, the shootings that’s going on, I don’t care what ‘hood you’re from, where you’re at, man. I love you and God loves you. Put them guns down.”
After Floyd volunteered as a guide for a Christian ministry moving into the neighborhood, he helped them organize basketball tournaments, barbeques, and courtside baptisms. But as the father of five children from several relationships, he had bills to pay, and despite his stature in the neighborhood everyday life could be trying. More than once, Floyd ended up in handcuffs when police came through the projects and detained large numbers of men, though he would set the example for how to respond to police officers with calm and respect.
In 2014 he was ready for a fresh start in life and moved to Minneapolis to participate in a church program offering men a route to self-sufficiency by changing their environment and helping them find jobs. There he worked as a security guard at the city’s largest homeless shelter before training as a truck driver and working as a bouncer at a club. The pandemic forced the club to close.
On the evening of Memorial Day last year, Floyd was with two others when convenience store employees accused him of paying for cigarettes with a counterfeit $20 bill and then called the police.
All: Lord Jesus Christ, help us to take up the cross in defense of Black people and energize our work to not only take Black Americans down from the cross but to do away with crucifixion.
Station XIV: Jesus is Laid in the Tomb
Leader: We adore you, O Christ, and we praise you.
All: Because
by your holy cross You have redeemed the world.
Claudia Rankine:
A friend recently told me that when she gave birth to her son, before naming him, before even nursing him, her first thought was, I have to get him out of this country.
I asked another friend what it’s like being the mother of a Black son. “The condition of Black life is one of mourning,” she said bluntly. For her, mourning lived in real time inside her and her son’s reality: At any moment she might lose her reason for living. Though the white liberal imagination likes to feel temporarily bad about black suffering, there really is no mode of empathy that can replicate knowing that as a black person you can be killed for simply being black: no hands in your pockets, no playing music, no sudden movements, no driving your car, no walking at night, no walking in the day, no turning onto this street, no entering this building, no standing your ground, no standing here, no standing there, no talking back, no playing with toy guns, no living while Black.
Anti-Black racism is in the culture. It’s in our laws, in our advertisements, in our friendships, in our segregated cities, in our schools, in our Congress, in our scientific experiments, in our language, on the Internet, in our bodies no matter our race, in our communities, and, perhaps most devastatingly, in our justice system. The unarmed, slain black bodies in our public spaces turn grief into our everyday feeling that something is wrong everywhere and all the time even if locally things appear normal. Having coffee, walking the dog, reading the paper, taking the elevator to the office, dropping the kids off at school: All of this good life is surrounded by the ambient feeling that at any given moment, a black person is being killed in the street or in his home by the armed hatred of a fellow American.
The Black Lives Matter movement can be read as an attempt to keep mourning an open dynamic in our culture because black lives exist in a state of precariousness. Mourning that bears both the vulnerability inherent in black lives and the instability regarding a future for those lives. Black Lives Matter aligns with the dead, continues the mourning, and refuses the forgetting in front of us all. Black Lives Matters asks for an internal change: recognition.
For those who believe that the same behaviors exhibited by blacks killed by police would not have ended the lives of white men or boys, the subsequent failure to indict or convict the police officers involved in these various cases requires that public mourning continue and remain present indefinitely.
These murders alert us to the reality that a system so steeped in anti-black racism means that on any given day it can be open season on any black person—old or young, man, woman, or child. There exists no equivalent reality for white Americans. We can distance ourselves from this fact until the next horrific killing, but we won’t be able to outrun it. History’s authority over us is not broken by maintaining a silence about its continued effects.
A sustained state of national mourning for black lives is called for in order to point to the undeniability of their devaluation. The hope is that recognition will break a momentum that laws haven’t altered. So many people have been murdered because they were Black. It’s extraordinary how ordinary our grief sits inside this fact. One friend said, “I am so afraid, every day.” Her son’s childhood feels impossible, because he will have to be—has to be—so much more careful. Our mourning, this mourning, is in time with our lives. There is no life outside of our reality here. Is this something that can be seen and known by parents of white children? This is the question that nags me. National mourning, as advocated by Black Lives Matter, is a mode of intervention and interruption that might itself be assimilated into the category of public annoyance. This is altogether possible; but also possible is the recognition that it’s a lack of feeling for another that is our problem. Grief, then, for these deceased others might align some of us, for the first time, with the living.10
All: Understanding white supremacy/racism as America’s original sin makes clear the tasks before white America: admit we are racist, tell the truth about racism, turn away from racism, make reparations for racism.
So we remember:
Trayvon Martin…………..Say his name!
Laquan McDonald………Say his name!
Charleena Lyles…………..Say her name!
Wendell Allen……………..Say his name!
Tamir Rice………………….Say his name!
Terence Crutcher…………Say his name!
Shereese Francis………….Say her name!
Kurt Reinhold……………..Say his name!
DeAunta Farrow………….Say his name!
Prince Jones………………..Say his name!
Sandra Bland………………Say her name!
Philando Castile…………..Say his name!
Angelo Crooms…………….Say his name!
Alonzo Ashley………………Say his name!
William Crawford III…….Say his name!
Derrick Jones……………….Say his name!
Malissa Williams…………..Say her name!
Rayshard Brooks…………..Say his name!
Ramarley Graham…………Say his name!
Casey Goodson……………..Say his name
Natasha McKenna…………Say her name!
Breona Taylor……………….Say her name!
Walter Scott………………….Say his name
Tarika Wilson………………..Say her name!
Amaud Arbery……………….Say his name!
Elijah McClain……………….Say his name!
Aiyana Stanley-Jones……..Say her name!
Amadou Diallo………………Say his name!
Freddy Grey………………….Say his name!
George Floyd…………………Say his name!……..George Floyd…....Say his name!
George Floyd…………….Say his name!……..George Floyd…….Won’t you say his name!
BLACK LIVES MATTER
BLACK LIVES MATTER
BLACK LIVES MATTER
BLACK LIVES MATTER
Credits:
1,2: JW Terrill and Ben Simpson were interviewed in the 1930’s as part of the New Deal’s Federal Writers’ Project. Their narratives were published in Lay My Burden Down: A Folk History of Slavery, edited by B. A. Botkin, 1945
3: Appendix to Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
4: James Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, 2011
5: Douglas A. Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II, 2008
6: Patrisse Khan-Cullers & Asha Bandele, When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir, 2017
7: Ian Manuel, I Survived 18 Years in Solitary, New York Times, March 25, 2021
8: Bryan Stevenson, Mass Incarceration, for the New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project, August 18, 2019
9: Elie Mystal, There’s Only One Possible Conclusion: White America Likes Its Killer Cops, The Nation, May 27, 2020
10: Claudia Rankine, The Condition of Black Life is One of Mourning, New York Times Magazine, June 22, 2015