Guardian by Julius Lester

her.
    Nothing I do eases the pain, not even putting everything on paper. I knew the truth that night, just as my father did. I kept quiet. And my being a child of fourteen is no excuse.
    It was not that I could have saved Willie’s father. But if I had said something, if I had told the truth, William Benton, Senior, would not have died alone. He would have had the solace of knowing that someone believed him, that someone was not afraid of the truth.
    How do I atone for the sins of that time, of that place? I atone by forcing myself to remember the cruelties committed in the name of my race. By remembering, I hold the pain close to my heart. Thatwas what William Benton, Senior, did by not forgetting the mountains of bodies.
    Being guardians of those pains.
    That is the least we can do for them—and ourselves.

Author’s Note
    I was born in 1939 and grew up in the Midwest and the South at a time when lynchings still occurred. They were not as frequent as they had been, but frequent enough to hang over my life and the lives of other young blacks as something that could happen to you if you did not “stay in your place.”
    I remember vividly the lynching of Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi, in 1955 and particularly the photographs in Jet magazine of his brutalized body. I also remember the lynching of Mack Charles Parker in 1959, also in Mississippi. When I did research in 1966 in Mississippi on black folklore and music, I interviewed people who, with no prompting from me, described lynchings they knew of. Lynching was a form of domestic terrorism designed to intimidate black people from seeking political and economicpower as well as education. For the most part, it succeeded.
    The word lynching comes from the name of a justice of the peace in Virginia in the late 1760s. Charles Lynch “and his neighbors created an informal court…to deal with suspected Tories and horse thieves.” They were brought before Judge Lynch, found guilty, and “tied to a walnut tree in his front yard and given thirty-nine lashes.” This extralegal justice became known as Lynch’s Law and, eventually, lynching. 1
    Lynching is the use of violence by a mob to circumvent the law and injure or kill a person accused of a crime. Between 1882 and 1968, approximately 4,743 men and women were lynched. Of that number, 70 percent—3,446—were black and 1,297 were white. These numbers represent only those lynchings for which there is a written record. There were lynchings that were never reported. Estimates of the number of lynchings before 1882 vary from 4,000 to 20,000, the number author Dorothy Sterling cites as the number killed by the white supremacist terror group, the Ku Klux Klan, between 1868 and 1871 alone. A Congressional investigation carried out in 1872 saidthat “as many as 2,000 blacks had been killed or wounded in Louisiana alone since the close of the Civil War.” 2 Of the lower forty-eight states, only four states never had a lynching—Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island.
    In most instances, lynchings were supported by state and local governments, the police, and the media. In 1899 a black man named Sam Hose was accused of murdering Alfred Cranford, a white landowner, and his baby, and raping the landowner’s wife. The front page of the Atlanta Constitution had a headline that read, “Determined Mob After Hose; He Will Be Lynched if Caught.” The subhead added, “Assailant of Mrs. Cranford May Be Brought to Palmetto and Burned at the Stake,” Palmetto being a town in Georgia. Two trains of white people came from Atlanta to watch.
    Lynchings were seen as social events. For one anticipated lynching in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1917, people camped out overnight at what was to be the site, and some parents sent “notes to school asking that their children be excused” so they could attend the lynching. 3 People posed for photographs in front