This week I kept working on the finding aid. I’m about a quarter of the way through now. The documents I’ve come across this week are mostly dealing with the horrors of lynching in the 1920s. Reading some of these actually makes my stomach turn.
I keep reading stories about people getting dragged from their homes at night, getting shot, burned alive. I knew that lynchings were bad, but I never realized how bad. In school they overlook the worst cases, and I was so shocked reading some of these cases that people brought to Wilson’s cabinet.
The worst one is where a local police department turned over a black prisoner to a mob, who then burned the man alive. The governor of Mississippi claimed that he didn’t have any way to stop it, and that he couldn’t call in the national guard. The thing that disgust me the most is the fact that the local law enforcement didn’t even try to uphold the rights of their prisoner. They just willingly turned him over to this horrid mob.
I’m certainly learning a lot that I didn’t know by working on this project. While a lot of the documents I’m thumbing through are kind of depressing, I think it’s good to learn about these things so that people don’t romanticize the past. I’m definitely glad that I live in the time I do now. With all the problems in the world and in our country, especially regarding race relations, we’ve made great strides away from the atrocities of our past. Hopefully we’ll continue to learn and become better over the decades.
