My grandmother was born and raised in Camden, New Jersey. When she was young, she would accompany her parents on family trips to where they had grown up: Melfa, Virginia, a tiny enclave at the bottom of the Delmarva Peninsula, between the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean.
But in Melfa, it wasn’t “appropriate” for any Black person to look a white man in the face, let alone a child, and there was a price to be paid for anyone who did.
It was on one of those trips that she learned why her parents had decided to make New Jersey their home: Melfa, at that time, was still very much in the Jim Crow South.
When she was sent to the local store to pick up a few items, while paying at the cashier’s table, she looked the store owner in the eyes as she spoke to him. It was something that was considered normal, even polite, in Camden.
But in Melfa, it wasn’t “appropriate” for any Black person to look a white man in the face, let alone a child, and there was a price to be paid for anyone who did. As the store owner was about to retaliate, a white customer, a man, interrupted and cautioned the owner, “That there is Lou (Lucretia) Ames’s granddaughter. She’s from up North. She don’t know better.”
My grandmother walked out of that store without any physical harm but with a deeper understanding of how her parents, and her extended family still living in the Jim Crow South, had to adhere to the rules of a corrupt history of their supposed inferiority, based solely on the color of their skin. In fact, their very survival depended on that adherence.
Her father left Melfa to escape Jim Crow and start a family away from its terror. Nevertheless, it was possible that my grandmother may not have survived that day. Emmitt Till, after all, was killed in Jim Crow Mississippi while visiting family.
Jim Crow lynched Black people and shot Black people, and those who Jim Crow didn’t kill, he terrorized, clad in white robes with burning crosses and statues of men who fought to keep Black people in chains.
The moral power of my grandmother’s story is in its truth. Stories like that have an incorruptible truth, even when there’s a false historical record that denies them.
In a recent speech, President Donald Trump upheld the exact opposite of my grandmother’s story.
The President, speaking on the 250th anniversary of the signing of the U.S. Constitution, encouraged people like my grandmother to deny the truths they knew. According to Trump, Jim Crow was just a footnote in stories like my grandmother’s—a footnote only worth mentioning because America made it possible for progress.
It’s a story many white people want to believe, that America wasn’t founded on Black oppression and Indigenous removal, but on liberty and justice for all.
The corrupt story Trump continues to tell enables many to believe that the United States is “the greatest nation in this history of the world,” despite long-standing racial inequities, now even further exposed by a global pandemic. It’s a story many white people want to believe, that America wasn’t founded on Black oppression and Indigenous removal, but on liberty and justice for all.
During his speech, Trump called for the creation of a “1776 Commission” to promote patriotic education in schools. But I can honestly attest, as a former history teacher, that there is no need for such a commission. That history is already being taught in the stories, fables, and myths that uphold a patriotism of “heroic” white men, whose exploits on the road to freedom included stops along the way where they killed Black men and Indigenous people, raped Black women, and robbed Black children of their families and future.
These historical figures are already found in textbooks. They’re taught by teachers who fail to challenge this corrupt myth. One history teacher in Dallas, Texas even included white vigilante Kyle Rittenhouse in an assignment that asked students to choose a “hero of the modern age.”
Indeed, Trump’s need to double-down on a false historical record arises from the same reason the “Lost Cause” narrative emerged after the Civil War: by depicting America as exceptionally good, it covers up the truth that, in America, all men are created equal only on paper, and only certain people occupy the halls of power, as others occupy cages within and at America’s borders.
It is why white people vote for him; he tells the myth of white supremacy as fact. They vote for him because he has the audacity to say that immigration and affirmative action are the reason that white people are without jobs, adequate wages, health care, and educational opportunities.
They vote for him because he has the audacity to say the people who protest in the streets for Black lives are ungrateful for our society—a society centered around racism, poverty, and war.
But standing against the likes of Donald Trump and Senator Tom Cotton means speaking the truth that enslavement is the center patch in America’s quilt. Declaring this country’s sins, as many have and continue to do, is the only path forward.