Academic

BANISHED

By Sherrilyn Ifill

Nooses have fallen so far outside the national conversation that it came as somewhat of a shock last Tuesday when President Bush finally condemned noose displays in a ceremony at the White House commemorating Black History Month. The noose, said the President ?is wrong . .. [and has] no place in America today.?  The President forcefully insisted that displaying a noose is ?not a harmless prank, and lynching is not a word to be mentioned in jest.?  Instead the noose, said the President, ?is a symbol of gross injustice.? http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23131433/from/ET/

The timing of the President?s statement was curious.  Months earlier, when noose incidents were on the front page of major newspapers every day, a presidential statement denouncing the display of nooses would have been a powerful and authoritative repudiation of racist symbols.  Yet at that time, the President was silent on the issue.  As a result, President Bush?s statement last week seemed strangely out of time.  It read like a presidential staffer?s random selection from a stack of draft statements hauled out for Black History Month. 

            But perhaps the President is just the victim of a political/cultural tsunami few of us could have predicted five months ago.  The powerful presidential candidacy of Barack Obama has changed and elevated the public discourse about race into one about ?hope? and ?change,? pregnant with uplifting possibilities. Traditional ?Black History Month? activities, focused on the civil rights movement, slavery and the Middle Passage, seem almost quaint this year.  Instead, many seem to think that we are poised to step into a new racial dimension, freed from the shackles of ?old school? race talk with all its untidy references to slavery and white supremacy.  I don?t know.  But even — and perhaps especially — in this ?new world,? understanding the history of white supremacy and its effects on the conditions and development of black communities throughout the U.S. remains critically important.  I?m all for 21st century solutions for 21st century problems.  But if we don?t understand the 20th century underpinnings of the conditions we currently face, we will be hard-pressed to find our way out of them.  I comment on the significance of the noose in the ?age of Obama? at www.beaconbroadside.com .   

            Beginning on Tuesday night we have an opportunity to explore a key aspect of 20th century American racial history when the film Banished begins airing on PBS stations as part of the Independent Lens series. The film?s director is Marco Williams, the talented director of The Two Towns of Jasper, http://www.twotownsofjasper.com/filmmakers.html  a film about the black and white communities in Jasper, Texas after the lynching of James Byrd in 1998.  Banished tells the story of 3 U.S. towns that violently ?banished? their black population 100 years ago.  We hear from the descendants of black families who were expelled from these towns, and from white residents who currently occupy the land formerly owned by black town members.  The film hints at just the tip of a broader phenomenon in U.S. history.  Historian James Loewen, author of Sundown Towns:   A Hidden History of Racism, has estimated that over 10,000 U.S. towns violently or illegally prohibited blacks from living within their borders.  http://www.uvm.edu/~jloewen/sundowntowns.php   Loewen?s meticulously researched book suggests that this practice continued well into the 1970s.  The effect of this displacement on the material condition of black families, who often were compelled to leave towns, abandoning their land, homes, bank accounts and other assets, has never been comprehensively examined. 

            Banished begins airing on PBS stations on Tuesday, February 19, 2008.  Go to

http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/banished/ to find out when Banished will air on your local pubic television station.

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Full post as published by BlackProf on February 19, 2008 (boomark / email).