Lynching Michael Jackson

The King of Pop is dead.

Michael Jackson – whatever you may think about his eccentricities – was huge. According to the Guinness Book of Records, Michael Jackson was the most successful entertainer of all time. “Thriller” was the world’s best-selling record ever.

As the King himself said, “The sound . . . of approval rolls across the universe, and the whole world abounds in magic.”

Now that he’s gone, maybe we can stop gossiping about his bizarre plastic surgeries, the rumored child abuse at Neverland, his weird ever-lightening skin color.

And in the midst of all this applause and blame, let’s look at the roots of Michael Jackson’s family. Michael’s father, Joseph Walter Jackson, was born in a tiny town in southern Arkansas in 1929. That year twenty-one African-Americans were brutally lynched in Arkansas.

To take just one story, in 1927 – just two years before Michael Jackson's father was born – a mentally disabled black man by the name of John Carter was charged with attacking two white people in Little Rock, the Arkansas capitol.

When Carter was captured, a frenzied mob of 100 people gathered and blocked the police from taking the prisoner to jail. Instead, the mob killed John Carter. After hanging him from a utility pole, they dragged his corpse through the city and burned his body in downtown Little Rock at 9th and Broadway.

Times were even worse back in the day of Michael’s grandfather, Samuel Jackson. Samuel – who died in 1993 at the age of 100 – grew up in the 1890’s when at least 35 black men were lynched in Arkansas. In just one thirty-day period the year before Samuel’s birth, eight African-Americans were lynched in Arkansas.

According to an 1892 news report, black Americans all over Arkansas were lynched “upon the slightest provocation: some being strung up to telegraph poles, others burnt at the stake and still others being shot like dogs.”

In 2005, the U.S. Senate passed a resolution apologizing for the lynching of 4,742 African-Americans between 1882 and 1968. Even then, a dozen senators refused to sign as co-sponsors of the bill. They ducked a roll-call that would identify the opponents of the bill.

So was Michael Jackson scarred by this brutal history of lynching in America? Or did his talent and celebrity inoculate him against the pain and hurt of American racism?

Not likely. After Michael Jackson's arrest in 2003 for alleged child molesting, his brother Jermaine Jackson denounced the prosecution, saying "At the end of the day, this is nothing but a modern-day lynching.”

Today, we think we’re innocent of America’s dark racial history. We think we’re not guilty for our grandparents’ sins.

But think again. The death of an American icon serves as a reminder that we all have a common stake in coming to terms with America’s troubled racial past.

* * *

To read more about the past of lynching in America, go to “The Lynching Calendar” at http://www.autopsis.org/foot/lynchplaces1.html. For state-by-state information, see the AfriGeneas States Research Forum at http://www.afrigeneas.com/forum-states/index.

You can read the Congressional Record of the Senate’s resolution apologizing for lynching at http://www.iconn.org/documents/s%20res39CongressionalRecord6-13-2005SenateComments.pdf. Also see the news report at http://abcnews.go.com/WNT.

Waking Up To Our Common Roots

Back in 1952, Will Slayden – then almost seventy years old – was a sharecropper in West Tennessee. A folk music collector heard that Slayden played banjo, and he found the old black man working the fields with his mule.

Slayden hadn’t owned a banjo in twenty years, so the collector loaned him his five-string banjo.

Slayden played tunes in what he called "drag thumb," and Will’s wife Emma joined in to sing a few gospel songs. The folklorist recorded the Slaydens singing and playing.

The story of Will and Emma Slayden caught my attention because I, too, am a Slayden with roots in Tennessee.

When I was a child, my father on special occasions would unroll the Slayden family tree. We would all gaze respectfully at the fading blue-print, so big that it covered our dining room table.

The tree, prepared decades before by an ancient great-aunt, purported to record the birth, death and marriage of every Slayden going back to 1545.

But the old family tree, comprehensive as it was, left out not only Will and Emma Slayden, but their entire branch of the family – the African-American Slaydens. Curious, I set out to find the African-American Slaydens. Where did they come from? What connected our families?

After digging up shards of family history and scouring the Internet, I discovered that the link between the black Slaydens and the white Slaydens began in slave times. To my surprise, I learned that my great-great-great grandfather William Everett Slayden kept slaves at his homestead in Dickson County, Tennessee.

This is the story of three African-American families – Julia Slayden, Allen Slayden and Rufus Slayden.

These African-American Slaydens did not, of course, choose to be part of our family. But they did take on the family name; and for nearly a century, the Slaydens – both white and African-American – lived and worked together in the hills of Dickson County, Tennessee.

Our families are inextricably bound by this shared history. I hope that telling the story of Julia, Allen and Rufus Slayden – painful as it is – will kindle a spirit of forgiveness. Hopefully, telling this story will help us “find that common stake we all have in one another.”