Few people know the name Michael Donald. I know that name: he was lynched in my hometown, Mobile, Alabama, in 1981.
In 1981, I was naive enough to want to believe that crimes against black people for merely being black had ended. There were laws, right? There was public acceptance that people just couldn’t do such things anymore, right?
But that year, Donald was killed by a group of white men who admitted that they were out looking for a black person to kill. The local newspaper ran articles about the killing — as well as a picture of Donald, hanging from the tree where his killers left him.
I never forgot the name. I was a college student then, living in another city, but when I learned about his death, I realized that we were the same age. Years later, I thought about where he lived and realized that we must have attended the same large public high school; as it turned out, he graduated just one year after I did. There seems to be some inherent dangers to living life as a person of color in the United States. Perhaps those dangers have their origin in the days when it was legal for black people to be disciplined, lynched, reminded that we occupy a lower place in society.
It had to sink in for me that I could have ended up just as Michael Donald did.
There seem to be some inherent dangers to living life as a person of color in the United States. Perhaps those dangers have their origin in the days when it was legal for black people to be disciplined, lynched, reminded that we occupy a lower place in society.
The segregationist laws that allowed that kind of discrimination were struck down — twice, actually. When people who didn’t like the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the Constitution persisted in creating human laws that devalue human lives, we tried again, an effort that led to the sweeping civil rights legislation of the 1960s.
But over the years, we’ve learned that laws can’t end the danger of living life as a person of color. The many lessons continue.
We learned in 2012 that 17-year-old Trayvon Martin could be killed while walking down a Florida street — because he looked like he didn’t belong. We learned in 2014 that 12-year-old Tamir Rice could be killed by a police officer seconds after the officer pulled up to the Cleveland park where Rice was playing.
We learned in 2015 that pastor Clementa Pinckney and eight members of Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, could be killed in their church after hospitably welcoming a young stranger into their midst.
In 2018, on the Fourth of July, we learned that Jazmine Abhulimen and her young child could be asked to leave their neighborhood pool in North Carolina because a neighbor who didn’t recognize them determined they couldn’t possibly belong there — while on the opposite coast, 91-year-old Rodolfo Rodriguez, a Mexican man legally visiting relatives in California, could be beaten with a concrete block by a passerby who demanded that he go back to his own country.
We also learned that year that Botham Jean could be killed while sitting in his own apartment in Texas, bothering no one, because an off-duty police officer could just make a mistake.
And this year, we learned that Ahmaud Arbery could be killed while jogging in Georgia because someone who saw him as he passed by on his run decided that surely he must be a criminal. We also learned that Georgia officials saw nothing wrong with this.
We’ve learned a lot of other lessons that there simply isn’t enough room here to describe.
