Between History and Hope: Remarks on the 128th Anniversary of the Lynching of Joseph McCoy in Alexandria, Virginia

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Wednesday night I had the honor of being the speaker for the annual event commemorating the lynching of Joseph McCoy on April 23, 1897, hosted by the Alexandria Community Remembrance Project (ACRP). I’ve included below my remarks, titled “Between History and Hope,” which are adapted from a chapter in my book, The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and the Path to a Shared American Future. I’m grateful for Rev. Josette L. Franklin, pastor of Roberts Memorial United Methodist Church for hosting the event; Alexandria Mayor Alyia Gaskins, for her beautiful opening remarks; Audrey Davis and Gretchen Bulova, Co-chairs of ACRP; and Tiffany Pache, ACRP Coordinator, for the invitation to be a part of this important work.

I always come away heartened by the work happening in local communities to tell the whole truth about our history, repair the damage, and build a more hopeful future. To those I’ve joined on the road, and to all of you working tirelessly in your local communities, thank you for your dedication to those efforts, which may, I am convinced, just save us all.

Robby

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Between History and Hope: Remarks on the 128th Anniversary of the Lynching of Joseph McCoy in Alexandria

History says, Don’t hope
On this side of the grave . . .
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme.
—“The Cure at Troy,” Seamus Heaney

The lynching of Joseph McCoy, whose family were members of this church, occurred on the Friday after Easter in 1897. More than 500 people, including some of Alexandria’s prominent citizens, were part of lynch mob. When a Washington Post reporter interviewed local citizens discussing the event on the streets the next day, he reported that most approved of the lynching. Given the times, we can reasonably assume that many, if not most, of those who participated in and approved of this awful racial violence were in church services just five days prior, celebrating the resurrection of Jesus and the promise of salvation and new life.

This proximity of white churchgoing and lynching was common throughout the U.S. In my book, White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity, (which has now been banned by the government at the US Naval Academy), I tell the story of white Christians in Atlanta streaming straight from church services to board special trains to take them to participate in the man hunt and lynching of Sam Hose (born Samuel Thomas Wilkes) in nearby Newnan, which took place on April 23, 1899, two years to the day after the lynching of Joseph McCoy. These events—where, for many white Americans, upstanding citizenship and Christian faith could walk hand in hand with brutal racial violence—demonstrate just how deep the American affliction with white supremacy goes.

The cure for this disease, this greed-induced madness, which has always threatened to strangle the best of American ideals and democracy, is remembrance and repair. All religious traditions implicitly understand the importance of such practices. We’re just coming out of a season of commemoration and remembrance in the Jewish and Christian traditions. In this religious space tonight, we still have the Easter lilies from last Sunday surrounding the pulpit. And carved into the front edge of the oak communion table right below me are the words of Jesus, “IN REMEMBRANCE OF ME.”

In my own interfaith family, we celebrate both Passover and Easter. Passover retells a story of the Jewish people that moves from enslavement and oppression to their liberation. Holy Week and Easter retell the story that moves from Jesus’ final days and crucifixion—which notably can be understood as akin to a lynching—to his resurrection. Both traditions call for annual commemorations of these foundational stories, not just for the sake of perpetuating historical knowledge, for but for understanding who we are. For only if we understand who we are can we grasp how to live with present integrity and build a better future. And, importantly for these days when difficult true stories are considered “divisive,” neither tradition shrinks from the more difficult parts of the story. The most important lessons for us always begin there.

We’re gathered here tonight in Virginia, a state that has the distinction of being both the first recipient of Africans who were kidnapped and brought to the British colonies against their wills and the location of the once proud capital of the Confederacy. The roots of white supremacy have penetrated deeply here.

But while researching my latest book, The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy, I came to a clear revelation: Every U.S. state contains similar legacies of white racial violence because every U.S. state was built on the same foundation, one rooted in white supremacy and justified with Christian theology: the conviction that America was divinely ordained to be a new promised land for European Christians. In each of the thirteen original colonies and in eight additional slave states, this deep founding myth justified the enslavement and exploitation of Africans in pursuit of white flourishing. In all, it justified the killing and dispossession of Native Americans and the claiming of their lands by good white Christian people, who alone possessed the virtues necessary for sustaining “civilization.”

We are just beginning, over the last two decades, to see widespread efforts to tell the truth about this troubling past, not just in the history books, but on the ground in local communities like this one. These late efforts are illustrative of the cultural churn we are experiencing in our time, a collective effervescence produced by a cyclical process of reckoning and resistance. In such times, courageous acts of truth-telling and sincere efforts to repair past damage are met with defensive and often desperate attempts to protect the social and economic status quo. There is measurable progress, but it often comes at a price, and it is rarely linear.

I grew up with a sense of America as a divinely chosen nation, and of my people—white evangelical Christians--as its rightful inhabitants. Over the last decade of my adult life particularly, I’ve struggled to reorient as I’ve redrawn terrain on that self-serving map. I’ve realized that I needed a more complex and mature understanding of not only history but justice. From the chosen’s vantage point on the high bluff overlooking the promised land, the river of history runs true from the headwaters to its terminus. Its waters are always navigable and calm. And its banks are never eroded.

The chosen’s view of justice is similarly satisfying. “But let justice roll down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream.” This image—voiced by the prophet Amos in the Hebrew Bible and secured in American political memory by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech—all too often functions, especially in white hands, as a naïve understanding of social change. It can imply that the injustices of the past and the powerful systems of present oppression will, naturally, when confronted with the facts, experience a catastrophic failure, like a dam suddenly breaking. A favorite text in progressive white Christian churches, its attractiveness derives from the unrealistic hope that confession of past wrongs will trigger the flood of justice, which will, by its own mysterious power, wash away the old and make all things new. Justice and righteousness, personified, rather than people, are the agents of change. There is no struggle or conflict, no costs to the powerful, no personal sacrifices or risks, only the magical appearance of a new world.

But real rivers meander. They gather tributaries carrying rain and soil from distant mountains. They flood. Some are seasonal. Others dry up altogether when environmental conditions shift. When rivers are fortunate enough to endure, they carve horseshoe bends whose increasing curvature finally causes them to sever their own bodies, leaving behind orphaned oxbow lakes as a testimony to former lives. This organic image provides a sounder metaphor for history and the work of justice.

The epigraph at the beginning of this chapter from Irish poet Seamus Heaney also evokes the power and unpredictability of water. Heaney wrote these lines as Nelson Mandela was being released from prison and the South African regime was falling in 1991. As an Irish poet, Heaney was also drawing on his own experience of the impacts of brutal British settler colonialism in Northern Ireland (where, by the way, the British and not Native Americans invented the practice of scalping as an efficient way for vigilantes to collect bounties for Irish killings); he was certainly not naïve. But like us, Heaney felt the pulse of new possibilities, the opportunity to wrestle with the challenges of our history while holding the hope of our ideals.

The contradictions between hope and history are palpable, perhaps even irreconcilable. In The Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress, writer and dean of the Columbia Journalism School Jelani Cobb wrestled with the harsh lessons that history has for those hoping to see progress toward racial justice. He titled the preface to the 2020 paperback, written ten years after the first edition of the book appeared during Obama’s first term, “On Hopes & Histories.” Looking back, Cobb notes with anguish the reactionary lurch the country took in 2016: “If Obama was the opening statement of a new age, it was now clear that there would be a vitriolic and contemptible response, one whose roots lie deep in American history.”

Cobb also issues one of the most concise, poignant explanations of Donald Trump I’ve ever read. “Absent Barack Obama [Trump] had no rationale for his own existence,” Cobb wrote. “The forty-fourth president operates as a kind of inverse guiding star for the forty-fifth, a mechanism by which he can look north to travel south.” And, I would add, if the Black man in the White House provided the fuel for an initial backlash, the Black Lives Matter movement and the removal of Confederate monuments in Richmond and across the South provided the accelerant for a second—one that has now unleashed the power of the federal government to openly and aggressively attempt to erase both the history of slavery and discrimination in America and the contributions of African Americans to our country.

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At many moments over the last decade, and particularly over the last few months, history has left me feeling cynical and even hopeless. Of the twin streams of American history—one representing America as a white Christian nation and one as a pluralistic democracy—the former has for too long been the dominant current. At this point in the American story, a tidal wave of equity and justice, if that is what it might become, still seems a building swell far offshore. Nonetheless, I remain convinced that the waters of justice are rising in a way that indeed feels different from any other in my adult lifetime. Indeed, the rising waters of justice are the very cause of the extreme and lawless reactions we are witnessing from an openly racist movement purporting to Make American Great Again through lies, erasures, and disappearances.

In The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy, I tell the stories of efforts at commemoration and repair in unlikely places such as Duluth, Minnesota, Tulsa, Oklahoma, and the Mississippi Delta. These efforts show us what can happen when just a few dedicated souls decide to tell a truer story about who we are and then harness the energy unleashed by that confession for creative action. Taken together, along with the myriad of other efforts across the country like this one, they reveal unrealized possibilities for our nation. While the destination seems scarcely discernible on the horizon, these beacons are sufficient, if we persist, to help us all chart a different course.

Four hundred years after the first African slave landed on these Virginia shores, over 160 years after the abolition of slavery, 128 years after the lynching of Joseph McCoy, and 17 years after the election of our first African American president, a combination of social forces and demographic changes has brought the country to a crossroads.

It is indeed difficult—and at times overwhelming—to confront historical atrocities. But if we want to root out an insidious white supremacy from our institutions, our religion, and our psyches, we will have to move beyond the forgetfulness and silence that have allowed it to flourish for so long. Importantly, as white Americans find the courage to embark on this journey of transformation, we will discover that the beneficiaries are not only our African American neighbors, but also ourselves, as we slowly recover from the disorienting madness of white supremacy.

What few whites perceive, and this is a truth that has come late to me, is that we have more at stake than our black fellow citizens in setting things right. As the great American writer James Baldwin provocatively put it, the civil rights movement began when an oppressed and despised people group begin to wake up collectively to what had happened to them. The question today is whether we white Americans will also awaken to see what has happened to us, and to grasp once and for all how white supremacy has robbed us of our own heritage and of our ability to be in right relationships with our fellow citizens, with ourselves, and even with God. Reckoning with white supremacy, for us, is now an unavoidable moral choice.

I am convinced that lasting change and the foundations for a truly pluralistic democracy in America is going to be built on efforts like this one in local communities. So I want to thank all of you for your courageous efforts at truth-telling and repair. In our current moment of extreme backlash—where the recipe for “proper ideology” consists only of willful ignorance and militantly-asserted white innocence—merely being here is an act of resistance, and, I would add, of patriotism.

Throughout my own journey and evolution on these issues, Baldwin has been an inspiration and a guide. I’m going to give him the last word here. He’s writing in a different time than ours, but his words from The Fire Next Time continue to resonate: “Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands; we have no right to assume otherwise. If we—and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of others—do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world.”

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