~a column by Colleen O’Brien
In the past 25 years, a world of hurt and fright has hit our news media with regularity — 50 to 60 mass killings have occurred in the U.S. The phrase “mass killing” is four or more dead and less menacing to us than its synonym “massacre.” A massacre is defined as “killing a number of usually helpless or unresisting human beings under circumstances of atrocity or cruelty.”
To list just a few —
- 4 in 1991 at the University of Iowa
- 32 in 2007 at Virginia Polytechnique in Blacksburg, VA
- 26 in 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, CT
- 14 a couple of weeks ago in San Bernardino, CA
Many say it is a lawless time (referring to people outside the law, not to the number of laws; we have more laws now than at any time in the history of humankind). But, however crazy it is out there in the movie theaters, grade schools, churches, army camps, colleges, malls in Charleston, Aurora, Chattanooga, Santa Monica, Sandy Hook, Carson City, Seattle, Dekalb — just to give you an idea of the anywhere-in-the-country kill sites– it is not the worst of times.
Nor, of course, are we the most troubled country when it comes to mass killings. Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Mali, Rwanda, Nigeria — to name a few — have seen killings of their own citizens for some time. We here in the U.S. don’t pay much mind to those constant high numbers of dead foreigners.
Nor do we read much history. On Nov. 10, 1898, an armed mob of whites in Wilmington, NC, burned down the state’s only daily African American newspaper. Then the mob killed at least nine blacks, according to the white press; scores of blacks, according to the black community. No one was charged.
On Jan. 1, 1923, carloads of Ku Klux Klanners rampaged through a small town of blacks in northern Florida. Inside a couple of days, either nine blacks, or 142 blacks or the entire town (an unknown number) of blacks were dead. No Ku Kluxxers were prosecuted.
The Tulsa Race Riot occurred in late May and early June of 1921. Thirty-five square blocks of black homes and businesses were torched, 10,000 blacks were soon homeless and jobless and 800 of these were in the hospital. Somewhere between 39 and 300 black people (again, depending on the black and white of who was chronicling) were killed by white people.
And not to forget the mass murder of a tender segment of our population that finally hit the national news: the Sept. 15, 1963 bomb that killed four young black girls during Sunday morning services in the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, AL.
Over the 400 years of the taming of what is now the U.S.A., there have been countless massacres . . . of Reds, Blacks, Yellows, Whites — Native Americans, African Americans, Asian Americans and just plain Americans: miners, union folks, communists, a suffragette, civil protestors, Mormons.
These mass thumpings of people who were the wrong color or religion or who lived where others wanted the land or who wanted a living wage or a voice in their own lives or who simply wanted to be left alone were perpetrated not by crazies on weird drugs or religion who’d been mistreated by their mamas but by the government, the army, the sheriff, the police chief (or any of these in drag — white sheets over their heads); i.e., by the lawkeepers of the land.
The current horrors are minor compared to what has gone before to make this country “great.” To say it is the worst of times is naïve, uninformed and the result of too much TV.
