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CNN Saturday Morning News

Panel Discusses Lynchings

Aired May 11, 2002 - 09:47   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
KYRA PHILLIPS, CNN ANCHOR: "Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America" is what we've been talking about all morning. This is the exhibit here in Atlanta, Georgia, at the Martin Luther King, Jr., National Historic Site.

The group with me this morning just went through the exhibit. I want to thank you all for joining us. We want to talk a little bit about this.

Dr. Thee Smith from Emory University, the religion department, we want to talk about moving forward. We want to talk about the healing process. And maybe you can offer some insight, not only for our viewers but the folks here who just went through the exhibit for the first time.

Sara, let's start with you. You are a Jewish woman, that is your heritage. You went through this exhibit. What were your feelings and thoughts?

SARA GHITIS, JEWISH ACTIVIST: What shocked me the most, even more than the gruesome pictures, was the faces of complacency of the perpetrators. And I came away very pained and thinking, How can we use this, these pictures, and what lessons are we going to get from them?

PHILLIPS: Dr. Smith, let's go right to that. Toxic pictures is the expression you used. How do you detoxify? And is it dangerous to be fascinated by these photos or highly disturbed?

DR. THEE SMITH, EMORY UNIVERSITY: Yes. The possibility here is that we could have a breakthrough in race relations in the United States that involves looking at the truth of race. But to get to that truth, we have to go through this outer shell of the kind of toxicity of the images as we've said. They're full of terror and horror, and there's a risk of getting fascinated just by the viciousness and the violence of it, getting kind of mesmerized and sucked into that.

And the challenge is to resist that and to try to ask questions like, How could this happen? What were these -- what was the humanity of the people involved? How can we reclaim that humanity? How could it -- how could -- what happened to them that brought them to this kind of action and behavior?

And that's one way, by interrogating, to avoid the contagion of the images.

PHILLIPS: You talk about reclaiming honor. John Crawford, let's go to you. Your grandfather was lynched, sir.

JOHN CRAWFORD, GRANDSON OF VICTIM: Yes, ma'am.

PHILLIPS: Tell me what it was like for you to look at these pictures, and how are you dealing with this, within your family and within the life you've led thus far?

CRAWFORD: Well, with me, it hasn't been too good, but I think if I take the whole picture as the family, it's very -- it's just not good for the whole family when they split up. And we've never come together again, not yet. Each year, or each time, we try to get back together. We're working on it, but we got a long ways to go.

PHILLIPS: Bernard, you're a minister. Go ahead and grab the mike there from Anthony. How do you find God in all of this? How do you find spiritual peace if you've been affected by this, or maybe not even affected by this, you've just -- you're traumatized, I guess, in a way.

BERNARD JORDAN, MINISTER: I guess one of the things that I've noticed that since September the 11th, we have -- the new buzzword is terrorism. And as I look at these pictures, I see terrorism happening way before September the 11th. So it's kind of a new thing, the buzzword, again, is terrorism. And you see the faces of these people, and you see the images, you're, like, you're in total shock.

But going through those times, you never saw that put into any -- that was never put in the media, the media weren't where it is today.

But to find God in this thing is that there has to be something -- you have to find something inside yourself. You have to look inside yourself to find your answers and your peace and find God within yourself. You can't look at the images, you can't look at the people's faces. It's an internal thing.

PHILLIPS: Matt Sloan, Emory student, Jewish heritage, your reaction, and as a younger man in this group, how do you see this for the generations to come? Is this important for all generations to see? And how do you move forward?

MATT SLOAN, EMORY STUDENT: Well, what struck me was what Sara said, first of all, about the faces of complacency in the crowd, and just how people were regarded as heroes for doing what they've done. And also the brutality of it, if lynching them by hanging wasn't bad enough, but burning them and setting them on fire and things of that nature.

Also, moving forward to the next generation, I feel that everybody needs to see these pictures. Sara had mentioned to me before that the diversity of the people coming in to see these pictures wasn't grand enough, and that more people need to come in and see them, not just African-Americans but Jewish people as well, and as well as all the other ethnicities that we have in Atlanta, and everybody across the nation needs to see these.

PHILLIPS: All right, we're going to continue to pass the mike, continue this discussion. Dr. Smith, we want your reaction. We're going to take a quick break. We'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

PHILLIPS: Continuing our discussion now, Dr. Thee Smith, truth holds tremendous value here in this room.

SMITH: Yes. One of the possibilities is that we could begin to understand why relationships between black and white Americans, and by extension other people of color in the United States, are so conflicted, are so -- you know, it's kind of often like a mine field talking about issues of race.

Well, the reason is that just under the surface of our contemporary culture are sitting incidents like these, you know, they were just sitting right underneath our culture, unexamined, unprocessed. And this exhibition is an occasion to face that history, face ourselves, and process it. I almost want to say, once and for all, but in a significant way, sufficiently significant that we don't have to redo again and again every generation.

And so that's the promise and the possibility here of facing the truth.

PHILLIPS: Sylvia, how are you dealing with that process Dr. Smith talks about?

SYLVIA: It's a lot harder than I thought. The first time I saw these pictures, like I told one of the other individuals, it read like fiction. It's hard for me to know that this person had a soul, that this person had a family, that this person belonged to a community. And that is going to help me do what I need to do when the other visitors come in and I'm here to help them listen and talk to each other about how they feel about what's going on in here.

But for me, it's just hard to know that this was actually somebody.

PHILLIPS: So we want to talk about justice, reconciliation, finding peace.

Robert, you're actually investigating, let's pass the mike on down to Robert here. You're investigating a lynching as we speak.

ROBERT: Yes, the lynching from 1946 in Walton County. We've been at this now for almost 36, 37 years, since 1967. We did give the FBI and GBI (ph) some information, much-needed information, the information that they told us along the way that we needed. And once we got this information and gave it to them, then the whole ball game changed.

They are saying now that the evidence collected in 1946 was destroyed. Now they are saying that unless some of these people come forward and confess, they can't convict anybody. You know, and why would they want to put out this kind of information, with the information that we gave them, naming and showing those people that are still living, that was part of that lynching, is still living in Walton County right now.

Yet there have been no arrests made, and one excuse after another keeps coming forward. You know, so I'm thinking that, you know, this exhibition that we are seeing here today is very important. I think that we're talking about people coming to grips within themselves. If you talk to older black people that experienced this, you know, we're already there, because they will tell you that how they got from there to now was because they prayed a lot.

You know, so the rest of America needs to see this.

PHILLIPS: Dr. Thee Smith, final thoughts.

SMITH: Well, the challenge of litigation in, in, in, in, in north Georgia, in the Athens area where this lynching occurred, leads to the possibility of a kind of truth and reconciliation process, that if the federal agencies and state agencies are so unwilling to proceed with prosecution in this area, we at Emory have also been looking at the possibility of a truth and reconciliation commission approach.

Bishop Tutu was with us for two years, from 1998 to 2000, went around the country challenging the United States to conduct a truth and reconciliation process like what happened in South Africa, challenging us that if South Africa could do it, how much better could we do it, so to speak.

And the possibility is that we could invite people to speak the truth and to get past shame and guilt and move to honor by truth telling and by trying to achieve reconciliation at that level, and then investigate other issues of restitution and reparations and justice.

PHILLIPS: Ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much. We appreciate your time this morning.

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