Racism: America's Greatest Disease

The following is another excerpt from, The Spiritual Awakening of America. In the book I argue that America is in need of a spiritual renewal. I show from our own headlines, from coast to coast, how we've fallen from grace. Three national sins are highlighted in the work: Skepticism (our disregard for the authority of Scripture), Materialism (our drive to amass more stuff), and Racism (the concept that some people groups are inherently "better" than others). These three national sins must be acknowledged and renounced by all those who long for a spiritual awakening in the land. We can't expect the world to repent until the church repents. "For the time has come for judgment to begin with the household of God" (1 Peter 4:17).

Excerpt from The Spiritual Awakening of America: How God Uses Pain to Prepare Us for Revival.

But for the third item. How is it that after nearly two hundred and fifty years as a free nation, racism is still America’s greatest disease? George Sweeting, past president of Moody Bible Institute in Chicago writes, “Respect of persons is inconsistent with God’s grace. It is inconsistent with God’s law. In fact, respect of persons is an act of sin. Racial discrimination and racism are an insult to God.” It was Muhammad Ali who said, “Hating people because of their color is wrong. And it doesn’t matter which color does the hating. It’s just plain wrong.”

The following account was published by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution about an event that occurred one hundred years earlier in Brooks County and Lowndes County, Georgia, USA.

Hampton Smith was the 25-year old ‘boss’ of the Old Joyce Plantation. He bore a very poor reputation in the community because of ill treatment to his Negro employees. When Smith couldn’t find enough workers, he would pay for convict labor. One of the workers Smith gained this way was Sidney Johnson, who had been convicted for playing dice.

Hampton Smith would punish Johnson for any minor offense. He even beat Johnson for being too sick to work. Hampton Smith had a violent history with several other black workers on the Old Joyce Plantation. When ‘boss’ Smith beat a young black married woman, named Mary Turner, Mary’s husband, Hayes Turner threatened Smith. When Mr. Smith pressed charges against Hayes Turner, the black man was convicted by an all-white jury and sent to a chain gang.

In May of 1918, after one beating too many, Sidney Johnson shot and killed Smith. He then fled the scene and went into hiding. A white mob soon formed, and the manhunt was on for Sidney Johnson. He was the only suspect in the murder of Smith, but soon innocent Blacks were caught up in the rampage of mob violence.

Eventually, Sidney Johnson died in a shootout with the police on May 22nd. But five days before that, the mob captured Will Head, Will Thompson and Julius Jones on May 17th. That night Head was lynched near Troupville in Lowndes County, and Thompson and Jones were lynched near Barney in Brooks County.

On May 18th, the mob lynched Eugene Rice near the Old Camp Ground, although it was acknowledged that he was never associated with Hampton Smith’s murder in any way. On that same day, they arrested Mary Turner’s husband in Valdosta. Hayes Turner did time for threatening Smith, after Smith beat his wife. As deputies transported Turner from Valdosta to Brooks County, a mob seized him and lynched him near the Little River. They left his mutilated body hanging from a tree over the weekend. Chime Riley was killed when he was thrown into the Little River with turpentine cups tied to his hands and legs to weigh him down. The bodies of three unidentified black men were also taken from the river.

Mary Turner’s husband was lynched on May 18th. The next day she was taken by the mob. Mary was a mother of two, and eight months pregnant at the time. What was her crime? She had the audacity to complain about the lynching of her husband, arguing publicly that he was not involved in the murder of Smith. She threatened to report the names of the men who killed him. The mob seized her, for what the local newspapers called at the time, making “unwise remarks.” They carried Mary to the Little River and took her past the body of her dead husband, still hanging from a tree.

The mob of several hundred bloodthirsty people then took Mary to the bank near Folsom Bridge. They hung Mary Turner upside down by her ankles across the sturdy limb of an oak tree. Then they doused her body with gasoline and motor oil, and set her on fire. We don’t know whether she was still alive after the mob burned off her clothes, but that hardly mattered. As she hung upside down from the tree, someone took a knife, “such as one used in splitting hogs,” and cut open her belly. Her unborn child fell to the ground and gave two feeble cries. Then a member of the mob crushed the baby’s head under the heel of his boot, and the crowd shot hundreds of bullets into Mary’s body.

Later that night, Mary Turner was cut down and buried with her child near the tree, with a whiskey bottle marking the grave. Even though a complete report of these murders was given to Georgia governor Hugh Dorsey, no charges were ever brought against known or suspected participants in these crimes.

In 2012, the Georgia Historical Society, along with Valdosta State University, and The Mary Turner Project, erected a memorial marker just a few yards from where she died. Shortly after the marker was put in, someone shot holes into it. When a state official asked one of the relatives of Mary Turner whether he wanted to replace the damaged memorial, he stated, “I told them no. It has five bullet holes in it and those bullet holes were put there by someone who this sign doesn’t matter to. Just like Mary Turner’s life didn’t matter.”

~§~

He was sensitized to racism by the years of Nazi-inspired threats and harassment he suffered during his tenure at the University of Berlin. He was in the United States when the Nazis came to power in 1933. Fearful that a return to Germany would place him in mortal danger, he decided to stay, accepting a position at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. He became an American citizen in 1940. But what he witnessed in America shocked him. He realized that Blacks in Princeton, NJ were being treated like the Jews in Nuremberg, Germany. Finally, he had to express himself:

“I do not intend to be quiet about it. The more I feel an American, the more this situation pains me. I can escape the feeling of complicity in it only by speaking out. Racism is America’s greatest disease.” ~Albert Einstein

One of America’s greatest novels offers a helpful bit of advice that may cure America’s greatest disease. In To Kill A Mockingbird, widowed lawyer Atticus Finch shares, “First of all, if you learn a simple trick Scout, you will get along a lot better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view – until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”

Are you willing to climb into the skin of another race and walk around in it? If you’re not African American, consider that for a moment. It’s a fact that Blacks were brought here in chains, not to participate in the American Dream, but to work hard without pay, for their entire lives, in order to build that dream for others. A whole race of people brutally subjugated, assigned the permanent status as “inferior,” 3/5 of a person! What effect would 200 years of state-sanctioned, negative mega-programming have on any group of people?

Think about the two surviving children of Hayes and Mary Turner. Consider things from their point of view. Not a single person was held accountable for the savage murder of both their parents and a baby sibling, even though hundreds of people participated in it. What effect did that have on their psychological well-being? Climb into their skin and walk around in it. What impact would that make in your life?

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. writes in Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? - “Being a Negro in America means trying to smile when you want to cry. It means trying to hold on to physical life amid psychological death. It means the pain of watching your children grow up with clouds of inferiority in their mental skies. It means having your legs cut off, and then being condemned for being a cripple. It means seeing your mother and father spiritually murdered by the slings and arrows of daily exploitation, and then being hated for being an orphan.”

While keeping in mind the sage advice of Mr. Finch, the comments from Mr. King, and the orphaned children of Hayes and Mary Turner, read slowly and thoughtfully Philippians 2:2-11,

“Make my joy full by being like-minded, have the same love, being of one accord, of one mind; doing nothing through rivalry or through conceit, but in humility, each counting others better than himself; each of you not just looking to his own things, but each of you also to the things of others. Have this in your mind, which was also in Christ Jesus, who, existing in the form of God, didn’t consider equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself, becoming obedient to the point of death, yes, the death of the cross. Therefore God also highly exalted him, and gave to him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of those in heaven, those on earth, and those under the earth, and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”

Is the lie of racism stronger than the truth of Scripture? I think not. Is the work of the flesh mightier than the indwelling Spirit of Christ?I know not! Our key to victory is walking in the fullness of His Word and His Spirit!

Grace, Peace and Jahspeed!

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