RACISM’S UGLY LEGACY — Think of this post as a dose of castor oil. While it is perhaps natural to cling to memories of “the good old days,” we cannot completely ignore the dark side. I have included here a couple of articles that should remind us of that part of our past. Bear with me. This will be a longer post than usual.

The 1907 article in The Covington Enterprise reports the death of my great grandfather, Lucius Holden. It spells his last name “Holder.” He was the father of Catherine Holden (later Bigby), Celia Holden (later Shipp, my grandmother), Lucius Jr. and George. The family version of what happened is that he had gone to town to sell some crops and, while flush with cash, was attacked by white folks and killed and that his body was placed on the train tracks. The newspaper article makes it seem that he was drunk in the middle of the week and somehow ended up dead. “Lucius Holder, a negro who lived on the plantation of Mr. John Holder, of near Almon, was found dead just outside of the city limits on the Georgia railroad on Thursday morning.. The negro had been seen on the streets of Covington the night before and was said to be under the influence of whiskey. Coroner Peek went out to the scene early in the morning and held an inquest over the body and up to the time for going to press the jury has not returned a verdict.”

Mysterious never solved deaths were not all that unusual. Nor are stories that black men were warned to get out of town if they wanted to remain alive. That is supposedly why some men disappeared, fleeing “up the road” or “up North” in the middle of the night. A historian in Atlanta is looking into information he has come upon that my grandfather Norman L. Moore Sr. was nearly lynched in Newton County in the early 1930s for not being sufficiently respectful to white women. I am trying to learn more about that. There was an active KKK in the Conyers area for some time. The 1948 article from The New York Times shows that the Klan tried to keep the relatively few blacks who were registered to vote so cowered that they would stay away from the polls. Paulette Hill recently shared a memory from her childhood in Milstead: “I remember too the weekend rides by the Klan. They would drive down Milstead Road on Friday nights. Mom would have us get in the house with the lights out until they passed. The ignorance of these people to subject us to that kind of fear. We didn't know any better and the less trouble we caused, the better off we were. Or so we thought. These same riders were elected officials, merchants, ministers.”

In the late 1960s when my family lived in a two-family house on that part of Main Street that is near the old Lithonia Lighting plant, I recall Mrs. Stella McCollum sitting on the front porch and talking about having her shotgun ready for the nightriders the adults had heard were out and about. I recall being kicked off the choo-choo train that the owners of the Colonial Store had running through the parking lot during its grand opening on West Avenue in the early 1960s. I had innocently rushed to sit in the front car, with white folks, so that I could be close to the clown who was driving the train. He turned around and said something like, “Nigga, what you doing here?” and ordered me off. I didn’t know what a “nigga” was but I knew he had said it with hatred and the hint of violence. Blacks could buy food at Mamie’s (or whatever it was called in the 1960s) only if they got it from the back window or back door, I believe. Some convenience store owners were openly suspicious of and hostile to black kids who came by after school. I’m talking about during “Leave It To Beaver” times, long before the advent of drugs and guns might justify such suspicion.

There were rules about how to be deferential to white people and to always say “yes suh, no such; yes ma’am, no ma’am”. We have heard of white men who girls were warned to keep a distance from because they were known sexual predators, or to use the euphemism of the time, “they had free hands.” They had entree into our communities because they were rent collectors or life insurance salesmen or came peddling subpar but still desirable goods.

Many of our elders had to fight for job opportunities. I’m sure, if we ask, we can find a lot of examples of what it took to get a job on an assembly line or to be promoted to a supervisory position or to be hired with full privileges in law enforcement or to advance in the educational hierarchy. Or, before that, the difficulty in getting paid for a day's work in the cotton fields or other backbreaking agricultural work.

To recall this part of our past is to illuminate the courage and cleverness and commitment of our forebears (and to make younger generations aware of what some of us endured to get to today). Despite it all, our forebears were able to create safe spaces — communities — in which we could thrive. They pressed ahead to make a way out of no way. We should proudly SAY THEIR NAMES and share their truths.

Submitted by E.R. Shipp to the Black Heritage of Rockdale Facebook page.