Dr. Patton has been gathering research for a new book she's writing about violence against Black children, and lynching being one of the violent ways Black children have been murdered by slavers and white supremacists in America.

This post is one of several that she has written and shared with her followers on her fb page.

We felt it deserved to be placed in our gallery titled, "Lynchings".

Photos credit: Dr. Stacey Patton
Collage credit: The G.C. and Frances Hawley Museum®
I Remember Our History®
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Stacey Patton
May 14, 2022

Got up early and started placing markers for these godlings whose lives were stolen during Jim Crow.
Last night when I was sitting at the table writing their names and the dates that they were lynched, I was rather academic about it.

But this morning it was very emotional for me as I listened to my feet under me, the crowing rooster next door, the chorus of morning birds, and the sound of the metal stakes being forced into the wet mulch and rocky ground.

Julia Baker’s was especially difficult. She was only an infant when she was shot out of her mother’s arms during a nighttime raid on her family.

So was Jesse Washington whose lynching was attended by 15,000 people and photographed while in process. Can you imagine living with the fact that the only surviving photos of your child are of him naked, bloodied, being tortured and then roasted? And then knowing that parts of his body were kept as souvenirs in jars of formaldehyde by people in your community and strangers from out of town?
Can you imagine that?

I stood over Jesse’s little Sweet Bay Magnolia hurting for his parents and siblings whose voices were never captured in the historical record. I wonder if his mama went mad.

Oh, and the siblings: Herbert and Costella Sells. Blown up by dynamite while they were sleeping. Alma and Maggie Howze. Both pregnant and hung from a bridge next to brothers Major and Andrew Clark. Their parents were too afraid to claim their bodies.

Can you imagine living without closure? Six children hung from the same bridge in one night, two of them unborn.

Abortion debates?

Can we talk about this country’s tradition of murdering pregnant Black women and girls, and doing sadistic postmortem shit to their unborn? This country has never cared about unborn Black babies.

Y’all, sometimes I don’t know how I’m gonna get through this chamber of horrors. So I cry a lot. Silently and alone.

I gotta put all that grief in the soil and plant something pretty. Maybe these godlings will see all this beauty and bless them. Make them grow. Send me, us, a sign to let us know that they are still with us. Wounded but not forgotten.

Stolen but still watching us. Reminding us that healing and resistance and redemption and destroying this demonic system that murdered them are our ancestral mandate.

This is all symbolic, I know. Writing these children’s names into history and paying homage won’t bring any of them back. And there will never be justice for them, for their families, or their communities who have lived with the festering wounds for decades. But we must not let their names and their stories be lost to history.

Doing so would be treasonous to the ancestors who endured some horrific shit so that we could be here.