Clint Smith on Lynching and its Legacies in Maryland
Join us live on February 17 when Smith talks with Dr. Jessica Marie Johnson about his book "How the Word is Passed."
This history is never distant; it follows us everywhere we go. It lives under the soil of the playgrounds where we bring our children to play, under the concrete we drive on in our neighborhoods, and under the land upon which we live. It rests beneath our feet in ways that we are—that I am—still discovering. - Clint Smith, “Now We Know Their Names.”
At Hard Histories at Hopkins, we are often asked how we see the relationship between the past and present. What, the question goes, is the relevance of past wrongs, injustices and atrocities to the present? Occasionally we hear “Why not leave the past in the past?”
In those moments, I look to the lessons from Sherrilyn A. Ifill’s 2007 study, On the Courthouse Lawn: Confronting the Legacy of Lynching in the Twenty-First Century (Beacon Press), reissued in a new edition in 2018. Many of you will recognize Ifill as the brilliant leader of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and a much talked about prospect for appointment to the US Supreme Court. But On the Courthouse Lawn draws upon Ifill’s early years as a voting rights advocate and her scholarly saavy as a professor at the University of Maryland Law School.
In her study, Ifill asked why so many Black American on the Eastern Shore stayed away from the polls on Election Day despite the protections of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and advocacy by LDF lawyers. She discovered that the memory of lynching, inherited by successive generations of Black Marylanders, fueled their reluctance to show up when it came time to cast ballots. Lynching might have been a wrong from the past, but Ifill showed how its memory had real consequences in the present. In this sense, to draw a sharp line between past and present when it comes to violence, intimidation and voting rights is a false distinction. The past remains present.
In his February 2 column for The Atlantic, poet, journalist and essayist Clint Smith carried Ifill’s themes into our present in “Now We Know Their Names.” Smith, whose recent book How the Word is Passed explains how the past and present of slavery resonate in America, turned his attention to Maryland’s work on memory and reconciliation. Through the Montgomery County Commission on Remembrance and Reconciliation and the Maryland Lynching Memorial Project, Marylanders are at work today confronting our state’s history of lynching through both research and ritual.
Please join Hard Histories at Hopkins on Thursday, February 17, 2022 at 7 pm eastern for a virtual Fireside Book Chat with Clint Smith, hosted by Baltimore’s Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History & Culture. Smith will be in conversation with Dr. Jessica Marie Johnson, a professor of history at Johns Hopkins University and author of the multi-award winning book Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World (Penn 2021.)
- MSJ