What Now?

Exactly twelve months ago, I had only two events on my daily calendar as we were adjusting to life in the Covid-19 pandemic, and George Floyd was living his life unknown to me. Having never traveled to either of the cities in which he resided, Minneapolis or Houston, I imagine our paths had never crossed. Yet, with the availability of a number of forms of transportation, and the frequency of travel, maybe we crossed paths on a busy sidewalk in New York or Dallas. Maybe we passed each other in vehicles on the interstate going in opposite directions. Maybe we used different gates at the same terminal of an airport. We cannot know.

What I do know is that something happened within my body upon seeing Darnella Frazier’s cellphone video of the public lynching of George Floyd by a law enforcement officer kneeling upon his neck for almost ten minutes while Mr. Floyd was handcuffed. It was a visceral reaction of which I was unaware as it had been buried deep within my body as a child. It was a byproduct of the violence known as white body supremacy and racism that permeate our society. Long forgotten, I remembered it only when it resurfaced. A little girl during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, I was very aware of the risks and threats to my life because of the flawed construct of race. Emmitt Till was lynched in a neighboring state only three years before my birth. Today, this awareness is ever near.

Sadly, the lynchings of Emmitt Till in 1955 and of George Floyd in 2020 are not anomalies. The Equal Justice Initiative identified 5,200 lynchings of African-Americans from 1877 to 1950. More than 4,400 of them are memorialized at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama. Because of the nature of this domestic form of racial trauma and terror, there will always remain unknown names and unidentified victims of whom only God is aware.

For too long too many have squandered their integrity and their basic common decency by choosing to be complicit through silence. In instances when the State sought prosecution, smoking mirrors were used to justify the murders as the law was desecrated time and again by corrupt systems. The persons responsible for the coldblooded murders were often well known within the communities that absolved them because of their white bodies.. Thomas Williams was lynched in Sulphur Springs, TX in 1905. Named in his honor, his grandson Thomas Colvin was five months old at the time and would be my paternal grandfather. There was no trial.

With our nation’s 400-year-old history of broken promises and outright lies, maintaining hope is a challenging dance for those considered dispensable.. What is it in us that continues to fuel the embers of hope? We learn to guard them knowing that in an instance we can be thrust into the gut-wrenching position of rekindling them.

Steeling myself to face disappointment, I simultaneously sought to maintain hope that twelve of my fellow citizens would be guided by the facts of the case. Hearing the judge read the verdict of guilty thrice, I was numb. A fired law enforcement officer in a white body had been convicted for the murder of a man in a Black body whom he had sworn to protect and serve. Relieved, I could not express my feelings.

One trial does not undo or correct our history. The verdicts rendered in this trial do not herald a rebirth of justice in this nation. Yes, I am grateful for the conviction of Derek Chauvin, but I recognize that the injustices and inequities attributable to white body supremacy and racism will never be erased by one trial.

Twenty-four hours after the verdict, I am still numb, but want to hear your thoughts on one question. What now?