Accidental Haiku

I was picking off
the caterpillars when I
was stung by a bee.

Yippee

We are just back from Indianapolis, where our daughter and three of her teammates swam a fine 400 free relay and became Division III all Americans.

I didn't do quite so well, but at odd moments during the meet, I worked on the "Jim Crow in Columbia" piece of the present essay under construction. You'll see it posted as a separate page on this blog site. It runs about 4000 words, and to my mind, it is pleasingly self-contained.

To my mind today, that is. I may unravel it all tomorrow. Again, all opinions and suggestions welcome.

Jim Crow

After a long haitus during which my attention was fixed on my wife's health problems, I'm attempting to crank up the part of my brain that used to be engaged with Columbia's history. Over the last few days, I've pulled together the first section of a sixties chapter that I had been nibbling at last spring. The section gives a ground-level view of segregation as it was practiced in Columbia between 1927 and 1948. I'll post the current draft (about 2000 words) as a separate page on this blog, using the title "Jim Crow in Columbia." All comments and suggestions are welcome. Nothing motivates the writer of obscure history more surely than dicovering that somewhere he has an actual reader.

The Lower Journalism

Today I got a call from a student editor for Vox Magazine, a publication of the University of Missouri School of Journalism. She was calling on a cell phone to verify quotations from an interview a student reporter had conducted with me the week before. The subject was, of course, the James T. Scott lynching. The cell connection was so spotty that I could only hear about 4 words out of 5, which was making me a bit nervous, but I okayed a  half dozen sentences more or less on faith. Then the editor read this line.

Hunt says that although various incidents could have sparked the lynch mob, the most likely was due to tax incentives.

I said, "You'll have to read that one to me again. The phone connection is really rotten. It sounded like you had me saying that the lynching was "due to tax incentives"?
   She said, "Yes, that's right, I have, "tax incentives."
   "Does that make any sense at all to you?"
    "Well, no, not really."

Eventually the editor and I figured out what the source of the confusion was. I had read the student reporter the following two paragraphs, published on page one of the Columbia Daily Tribune the morning before the Scott lynching:

   It is generally believed that Scott is guilty of the crime and Miss Almstedt’s identification makes certain now that he was the man who attacked her.

   There has been much talk of mob activity and many men of sound judgment who do not believe in mob law are of the opinion that if it is positively proven that the negro is the man who committed the crime the taxpayers should be saved any costs that might accrue from a trial and that summary justice should be dealt to him.

There are more lessons to be learned here than I will take the space to list. Some make you want to laugh, some make you want to scream. I almost wish I had let the "tax incentives" quotation stand. It might have driven a few more people to read that front page story from 1923 and to consider the difference between merely inept journalism and competence turned into a deadly weapon.

Osama and Scott

On several occasions when I talked to people about the lynching of James Scott, they have asked me whether I thought such a thing could happen in Columbia, or in America, today. My answer prior to May 1, 2011, was generally a cautious "No." I'd say something like, "It would be naive to think that we have entirely left behind our wolfish instinct to become part of a pack, to abandon all human sympathy for some victim/enemy, and to rejoice in destroying him." But then I would say, "our wolfishness these days takes the form of virtual lynchings rather than actual ones." And often I would point to savage attacks on individuals made in anonymous postings on websites and such. Or to graffitti in bathroom stalls.

Watching America's, and Columbia's, reaction to the death of Osama bin Laden has changed my answer. One day several hundred sober Columbia's gather to commemorate the murderous mob action that took the life of James T. Scott in 1923. The very next night several hundred people gathered on the University campus to celebrate the death of Osama. Like their predecessors of 1923, the revelers of 2011 were predominantly young white men, often fairly drunk ones, celebrating the death a darker-skinned man who had at last "got what was coming to him."

Osama isn't Scott. I believe that Scott was an innocent man, killed because he superficially resembled a guilty one at a point when many in Columbia wanted a scapegoat to vent their rage on. I have no brief for Osama, and believe him to have been guilty of horrible crimes. Nonetheless, the celebrations on campus after midnight on May 2, 2011, brought to mind all to clearly the "celebrations" after midnight on April 29, 1923. There was a kind of tribal violence in the air that will prevent my saying quite so confidently as I used to that we are past the period where our town, or another American town, could countenance a lynching.

The James T. Scott Memorial Service

One of many things I learned in working with the James Scott monument project is that some stories run so deep in families and communities that it is hard for an observer from the outside to understand their significance.
     A reporter sent in from out of town might have noticed the amount of hugging in Columbia yesterday was somewhere above the national average. He or she might have noticed a lot of people chasing around the crowd because they felt it important to talk to particular people on this day. I don't know how an observant reporter could have missed the amount of emotion that was running just beneath the surface and periodically rising to the surface.
     But I doubt that any news report will capture either the complexity and depth of the Scott story of 1923 or of the Columbia story in 2011. So I'm reduced to testifying, as they say. If you had been there, if you had really been there, you would have found the experiences extraordinary and moving.
     I'm posting as a separate page this morning (you'll find it on the bar to the right of this blog) my own statement, read at the memorial service, about Hermann Almstedt's heroism on the night of the Scott lynching. I noticed this morning national press stories praising Professor Almstedt for going to Stewart Bridge in 1923 to defend a man he believed was innocent, which is a misstatement of the facts. The facts tell a deeper story and one that makes his actions that night even more significant.

Evidence that James Scott was Lynched for a Crime He Did Not Commit

I have just posted as a separate page on this blog the text of a talk I gave in January at the State Historical Society of Missouri. If you are reading this note from my Amazon author page, clicking on the title of this post will get you to http://DGHunt.blogspot.com. Once there, you should find a link to the Evidence lecture in the right hand column.
     Because some people may be more inclined to read the lecture on their Kindles, I will also post the lecture as a Kindle book at the minimal price of 99 cents.