What genealogy taught me about America’s real history

Avoyelles, LA. Noxubee, MS. Okemah, OK.  

What do all these places have in common? Well, they are all places where white terrorist attacks ended in the lynching of Black Americans. And they are all places where I discovered my ancestors lived when these terrible events occurred. Places that my ancestors fled in search of a better life — free from white supremacist violence and control.  

As I watched the scenes of domestic terrorism at the Capitol unfold last week, I saw post after post on social media from shocked white people saying that “this wasn’t the America they knew” or that “we are better than this…”. Indignant, I couldn’t help thinking back to all the things I have discovered in my own family history that prove this is exactly what America has always been.  

In a previous post, I wrote about a double lynching that occurred 1892 in Avoyelles Parish, LA where my Dorsey family lived at the time. The two men who were murdered had committed no crime, they just happened to be Black and standing in the path of a white mob who was searching for someone else.  

The others I have yet to write about were just as horrific. In Okemah, OK — where some of my Avoyelles ancestors had migrated — a woman named Laura Nelson and her 15-year-old son were hung from a bridge by a white mob in 1911. Photos of this poor Black woman and her child were put on post cards and sent as greetings by white people to their families.

And then there’s Noxubee, MS, the place where my Big Daddy’s family fled. I found at least eight documented white terror attacks on Black people – the worst being the race riot during the bloody summer of 1919 where a mob of white people attacked several prominent Black citizens for daring to organize and demand better pay and working conditions.  

I’ve read through hundreds of newspaper archives in effort to learn about my ancestors’ lives. I was sickened when I read about these horrific events they experienced. But what always stands out as I peruse the pages is just how widespread white terror has been throughout the centuries. My ancestors’ experiences were a microcosm of what was commonplace across America — white domestic terrorism.

From the southern towns my ancestors fled, to the northern and western cities where any threat to white power was met with white terror destroying Black lives, time and again the perpetrators walked away with no consequences for their actions. Most times they got a handshake and wink from the public officials who were complicit in allowing it to happen. If not, they were just as likely to kill the white officials that stood in their way. These are the experiences of the true America that has existed since its founding.  

We know America has seen large-scale insurrection before. Our country fought a years long civil war against millions of people who would rather die for the cause of white supremacy than live in a world where all could live free. America won that war, but it was a hollow victory. Those who fought on the side of the vanquished passed down mythical stories to their descendants about the Confederacy, built monuments to their traitorous leaders with little resistance, and made violent rebellion and terror apart of their DNA. One of the most difficult challenges for Black genealogy researchers is having to try to coexist in groups full of people praising their ancestors who enslaved and oppressed ours. If we want access to records, we have to play nice with people who brag about their ancestors’ “glorious” cause. 

But what did those who fought on the side of the victors do? Do we hear romanticized stories of the valor of Union soldiers and the cause that they fought for? Does “mainstream” America revere the cause of “liberty and justice for ALL”? Nope. I don’t know many people who even know where a Union memorial stands. I lived a stone’s throw from the African American Civil War memorial for years, but didn’t even know it was there until my genealogy research sent me looking for my ancestor Edmond Dorsey’s name listed among the USCT soldiers.  

But the South is littered with statues of traitors. Army bases are named for them. America has supported the myth of the valor of the confederates almost since Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox. The current president even vetoed a funding bill because he was opposed to stripping the names of traitors from these bases.  

Though John Wilkes Booth assassinated Abraham Lincoln, many believe he ultimately failed at his attempt to decapitate the US government because his band of misfits didn’t kill all of their intended targets. But he was far more successful in his aims than he gets credit for. The murder he committed put Andrew Johnson in power — a man who is in a dead heat battle for the title of worst president in history with the one that currently holds the office. And everything that happened afterward led to the corrupt 1876 election that handed the keys of power back to the very traitors who had waged war against their country to protect white supremacy.  

The reign of white terror that permeated the lives of my ancestors and those of my fellow Black Americans after Reconstruction ended in 1876 has never ceased. It continues to simmer and evolve. Its sentiments passed down through the generations to the terrorists who were empowered to lay siege to the US Capitol 145 years later. These people call themselves patriots, but they are far from it. They are not fighting for any noble cause. They don’t even know the meaning of oppression.  

If genealogy research has taught me anything, it’s taught me that Black people have been some of the truest patriots to this country. Celebrating its ideals with fervor, hoping for the day when we would get our share of what we built. My ancestors fought in the Revolutionary War, Civil War, WWI, WWII, Korea, and Vietnam. But time after time, Black patriots have been met with white rage and violence for daring to want just a little back from the country they gave so much for. 

The Red Summer of 1919 was white people’s terroristic response to the Black soldiers of WWI returning home expecting to be treated as the American heroes they were. Born that same year was Isaac Woodard, a Black man who fought in and survived the international battlefields of the second World War, only to be brutally attacked in his own country — while still in uniform — by a South Carolina sheriff. The sheriff, Lywood Shull, gouged out the young soldier’s eyes leaving him completely blind, yet the perpetrator was quickly acquitted by a jury full of his friends.   

Because we are used to, and even conditioned to seeing white people literally get away with murder, you won’t find too many Black people that say they are surprised by what happened at the Capitol. I was disgusted, but certainly not surprised. White terrorism is so much a part of the fabric of this country, that these people were able to openly plan their attack for weeks without being taken seriously. And now we have legislators who were complicit in stoking the flames calling for “healing” and “unity”, without accountability and justice. Those same sentiments are were used to welcome ex-Confederates back to the US Capitol and ushered in Jim Crow. History is repeating itself.  

America is built on a combined foundation of white violence and white apathy that causes those who aren’t complicit in the violence to turn a blind eye to it.  And if the people whose ancestors laid the cornerstones for that foundation don’t take a real stand and eradicate it once and for all, America will never be the country you thought it was.