By Steve Frey
The last black man lynched in Virginia was Raymond Bird. He was accused of having sex with a white woman and was taken from his jail cell just down the road in Wythville by a mob. Bird was shot, dragged behind a truck for more than nine miles, and had his mutilated body left hanging from a tree.
Raymond Bird never got his day in court.
Bird was one of 90 recorded lynchings in Virginia between 1880 and 1926 in 50 localities.
This was the environment in the South that the Rev. Martin Luther King opposed. Dr. King dreamed of liberty and justice for all, and on Monday, millions of Americans will reflect on how far we have come. Many others will dismiss King, his message and his efforts. We still have a long way to go.
After Raymond Bird was lynched, newspapers around the country condemned the actions of the mob, including Louis I. Jaffé, editor of the Norfolk Virginian–Pilot.
“Lynching goes unpunished in Virginia because, deny it as one will, it commands a certain social sanction,” wrote Jaffé.
Jaffé used editorials and a letter to Governor Harry Flood Byrd, Sr. to press for action by the state. Byrd, a strict segregationist (more on that later), was concerned about bringing new businesses to Virginia and realized that lynchings put the Commonwealth in a negative light.
That’s why the General Assembly, with the governor’s support, passed anti-lynching legislation on March 14, 1928. The state now could enforce stiff penalties against localities that didn’t report vigilante murders.
Heritage is a word often used by the descendants of those involved with the Confederacy. Of course, the Confederacy fought to preserve slavery and the lynching, torture, rape and sale of fellow human beings. That is a large part of its heritage.
But Raymond Bird had a heritage, too. Bird was a World War I veteran. What kind of country did he return to after serving his nation?
Bird’s descendants (he had three children) have a heritage, but theirs is very different from, yet connected to, that of their white neighbors. How do the descendants of the 490,865 slaves in Virginia belonging to 52,128 slaveholders including many in the New River Valley view heritage?
Then there are those Confederate monuments. Mark Elliott, a history professor at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro described their construction: “Eventually they started to build [Confederate] monuments. The vast majority of them were built between the 1890s and 1950s, which matches up exactly with the era of Jim Crow segregation.” The monuments were being built during the same period as Jim Crow and lynchings throughout the South. Mere coincidence?
No, Martin Luther King and blacks in the South have a very different perspective on Southern heritage. They remember how their ancestors suffered during slavery. They recall the laws that prevented them from voting. They recollect having separate drinking fountains and facilities; being prohibited from certain stores, churches, swimming pools, clubs, etc.; or not being able to travel without a Green Book listing the few stores, restaurants, and hotels they could use.
In Virginia, heritage also related to substandard schools and then, after Brown v. Board of Education, no schools at all because the whites in charge, led by that old segregationist, Harry Byrd, closed them down with “Massive Resistance.”
Substandard housing, “redlining,” restrictions on occupations and so many other constraints by whites is the heritage they remember. King wanted to change that, and he and thousands of others, blacks and whites, were attacked by dogs, knocked down with fire hoses, assaulted and yes, killed, to fight for that change.
But there is hope. Civil Rights legislation and Affirmative Action opened up colleges, home buying and jobs to blacks.
Hey, a black man was elected president.
The U.S. Senate unanimously passed the “Justice for Victims of Lynching Act” last month to make lynching a Federal hate crime. This was the first time in history the Senate passed such legislation.
The U.S. House of Representatives just passed a resolution condemning “white supremacy” in response to Rep. Steve King’s (R-Iowa) remarks in support of it.
Yes, the wheels of positive change are slowly moving thanks to families and schools that teach the importance of kindness, compassion, and tolerance and ministers who preach the Golden Rule and Jesus’s command to love one another. Years of teaching and preaching are making positive headway against the heritage of racial hatred.
Yes, now blacks are welcome in any store in the NRV. They’re not confined to the balcony theater seats, and they don’t have designated drinking fountains.
But there is more work to do. Some leaders claim that Neo-Nazis and KKK members are “fine people”; they call black athletes who protest murders SOBs; classify African nations as “sh–hole countries”; condemn whole nationalities as rapists and murderers (but they’re sure there are a few good ones, too) Black students are still welcomed to Virginia on their way to Tech or RU with giant Confederate battle flags on I-81. What concepts of heritage are implied for those young adults?
On Monday, let’s remember the importance of working together to attain Dr. King’s Dream, and in doing so, one day proclaim throughout the land that we are finally “free at last” of racial hatred and discrimination.
After all, Martin Luther King’s Dream, the heritage of love, peace and unity, belongs to all of us.
Steve Frey is a writer and CEO of Ascendant Educational Services based in Radford.
