Endurance test
In 1916, a 17-year-old boy named Jesse Washington was lynched in Waco, Texas. Ten thousand white people came to watch as young Jesse was hung, raised and lowered over a fire, and mutilated in such sickening ways I will not describe them here. Members of the crowd picked apart the boy’s corpse, taking parts of him for souvenirs.
This lynching was covered by the press around the world and they called it the “Waco Horror.”
My grandfather lived about 15 miles outside of Waco at the time. He was 25 years old and waited another 30 years before having a child, my father. I sometimes wonder if the Waco Horror was why he waited so long. I can’t imagine the constant terror of raising a little boy knowing a Waco Horror could happen to him.
Many Black parents warn their children about the dangers of white authority. Now, that warning is called “The Talk,” and it’s usually given to Black teenagers, but my father received his when he was just 9 years old. My grandfather explained to him that any white person could kill him at any time and not only would they get away with it, they’d likely be celebrated in their communities.
If that sounds like an unnecessarily frightening thing to tell a 9-year-old, you should know that Emmett Till was lynched the next year. A white woman claimed the boy had whistled at her, and a few nights later her husband and his brother kidnapped Emmett, then tortured and killed him. There was a trial and the killers were acquitted by an all-white jury. They later admitted to torturing and killing 14-year-old Emmett. Double-jeopardy kept them from another trial.
The white woman who claimed Emmett had whistled at her later admitted to lying about the entire thing. She died in 2023 without ever facing criminal prosecution.
When my father gave me The Talk, it was a little different. He explained that regular white people didn’t have to dirty their hands with us as much anymore. It was now far easier to call the police to lynch us.
My father also made it clear that a white person threatening to call the police on my white friends was not as life-threatening as that same threat being lobbed at me. And to be perfectly honest, I had a very difficult time believing him. But then police all the way across the country in Los Angeles were filmed nearly beating Rodney King to death. A trial revealed their racism and then they were acquitted.
White people started to catch on in 2014, after Michael Brown was murdered by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. Then they saw video after video of law enforcement killing unarmed Black people, and in 2020 there was finally a global uprising against police brutality. We even elected Biden under the belief that he would stop this madness. The uprising stopped, but Biden over-funded police and did little else as the cops spent year after year of his presidency killing Americans in record-breaking numbers.
Around noontime a few Mondays ago, a car stopped in the street in front of my next-door neighbor’s house. The driver got out of the car — leaving it running, like a delivery driver — slammed his door shut and went up to ring my neighbor’s doorbell. He was a redhead with a short beard and a bowl haircut, maybe 30 years old. He was carrying pamphlets and wore a lanyard. I was so distracted by all this that I almost missed the fact he was also wearing a bright red Susan Collins campaign shirt.
I called my girlfriend into the room to take a look at him, which he heard, and then he began yelling at me through my window. He couldn’t see much more of me than the color of my face, which was made clear by his threat to call ICE on me.
I went outside and he sped away. His Massachusetts license plate read: “Spirit of America.”
All of this was happening as a hearing took place in Biddeford on ICE’s killing of Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero.
I told my neighbors about it. I messaged those closest to me, posted about it on social media and wrote about it on my Substack. Since then, it’s been widely reported that Maine Republican gubernatorial candidate Bobby Charles plans to request ICE’s presence at the polls in November.
Frederick Douglass once said, “The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”
How much more are you willing to endure?
Samuel James also writes “Banned Histories of Race in America” at samuelj.substack.com.
