Ben Montgomery - A Shot in the Moonlight

All being ready now, and the darkness opaque, the stillness impressivefor there should be no sound but the soft moaning of the night wind and the muffled sobbing of the sacrificeslet all the far stretch of kerosene pyres be touched off simultaneously and the glare and the shrieks and the agonies burst heavenward to the Throne.

Mark Twain

A Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home, and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give.

Ida B. Wells

Tampa, Florida
July 2020

Dear reader,

An old buddy called out of the blue a few years ago to say he was passing through Tampa and to ask if I had time to meet for drinks. I hadnt seen Ahmed in quite a while, so I cleared my schedule. He was road-tripping with some friends who were headed farther south for a hockey tournament. I suggested they drop him off a little east of Tampa, so they could easily jump back on the road.

When I greeted Ahmed at an off-ramp hotel, he was wide-eyed.

Where the hell are we? he asked.

I had completely forgotten about the flag.

In 2008, a local chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans had erected, on a quarter-acre plot of private property, the worlds largest Confederate battle flag atop a 139-foot pole at the intersection of two main highways connecting Tampa to the rest of America. The controversial rebel flagthirty feet tall and sixty feet long, about the size of a semitrailerwas unfurled over the gateway to Floridas third-largest city in time for the two hundredth birthday of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States of America.

Welcome to Tampa.

And here stood Ahmedwhose last name, Cooper, was bestowed upon him by the white man who enslaved his ancestors, and whose father added an X to reject that heritageshaking his head, totally miffed but not totally surprised.

Its like the enemy telling me where theyre at, he said. This is probably what my ancestors felt when they went into sundown towns, like a reminder to stay in your place.

The problem with the Confederate flag and the granite statues of dead soldiers is that the Civil War never ended. It devolved into skirmishes and entanglements. As Nikole Hannah-Jones has written, it morphed into looser, legal forms of enslavement that are just as damaging as the whip. It rages on Facebook and in classrooms and in the streets of American cities, still. Its agents of trouble are Proud Boys and good ol boys and police with no-knock warrants and whites who should know better but choose silence.

If youve been paying attention, George Floyd is just the latest name on the list of victims that extends back to April 12, 1861, and beyond.

Contemporary police killings and the trauma that they create are reminiscent of the past racial terror lynching, reads a United Nations working report from a five-member group of experts who visited the United States. In particular, the legacy of colonial history, enslavement, racial subordination and segregation, racial terrorism and racial inequality in the United States remains a serious challenge, as there has been no real commitment to reparations and to truth and reconciliation for people of African descent. Impunity for State violence has resulted in the current human rights crisis and must be addressed as a matter of urgency.

That report? It was issued in 2016.

So we think about these symbols now, still, as statues fall. We think about the roots of hatred and racial supremacy manifest in flags and monuments and systems and songs as professional athletes kneel and bow their heads. We watch as armed Black protesters march through Louisville, Kentucky, to demand justice for Breonna Taylor, a twenty-six-year-old emergency medical technician who was shot to death by police who burst into her apartment with a battering ram around midnight on March 13, 2020, looking for evidence of drug dealing.

We see President Donald Trump on July 4, 2020, Independence Day, so named by and for white people, standing before Mount Rushmore, a sculpture memorializing two presidents who enslaved other human beings, carved by an artist aligned philosophically and politically with the Ku Klux Klan. We hear the president say, We believe in equal opportunity, equal justice, and equal treatment for citizens of every race, background, religion, and creed, but we also hear him say, Those who seek to erase our heritage want Americans to forget our pride and our great dignity, so that we can no longer understand ourselves or Americas destiny.Their goal is not a better America, their goal is the end of America.

But havent we known for a long while that a day of reckoning would come, that men once considered heroes would be seen in a new light? Didnt the New York Times predict as much on November 5, 1864, as the Civil War raged? But History executes a stern judgement, a prescient editorial reads. She forgets the petty squabbles, the party fame of the day. She will judge the actors in our Revolution, especially in their relation to the great questions of morality which belong to all time. At that distant day, Slavery will be as much a thing of the past as the inquisition is now in Germany, or gladiatorial shows in Italya feature of ancient barbarism and ignorance. But in their relation to the great struggle for its destruction, all public men will then be judged.

Isnt sculpting a better nation something akin to chiseling a figure from stone?

So we look to past improvements of our shared experience for comfort. To Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat on the Cleveland Avenue bus in Montgomery, Alabama, on December 1, 1955. To the nine teenagers who enrolled at Little Rock Central High School in 1957. To the four college students refusing to vacate a lunch counter at Woolworths in Greensboro, North Carolina, on February 1, 1960. To the march by six hundred activists across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, through tear gas and billy clubs, near Selma, Alabama, on March 7, 1965, known as Bloody Sunday. To Martin Luther King, Jr., on April 3, 1968, the evening before he was assassinated, telling striking Memphis sanitation workers that he had been to the mountaintop.