AMH Unit 3 Reflections

  

 As we closed out of the final unit, I would have to say that Unit 3 was my favorite despite the traumatic information that I learned that made me sick to my stomach. Being educated on the lynching’s that happened back in the day was something that I was not ready for. When the lynching’s are shown on television for movies or tv shows it’s something that I skip pass because I can’t bear the fact that my people really had to go through that gruesome punishment. People always tell the Black community to let go of the past, but how can we ever let it go when a lot of us have family members who are still here living this earth who was around when all the lynching and brutality that happened to them back in the day. I feel like until we confront our history of racial injustice and its legacy, we really cannot overcome the racial bias that exists today.

  Mary Turner is a woman who was lynched in the early 1900s that I knew nothing about, but I am not surprised because in today’s education we get talked about the same 4 Black Americans. What Mary endured while she was 8 months pregnant is inhumane and truly disgusting and the monsters who did that to her never made it to the pearly white heaven gates. She was brutally murdered because she wanted justice for her innocent husband so in retaliation the white mob bounded her feet hung her from a tree with her head facing down, threw gasoline on her and burned her. As she was still alive one of the white men took a knife and cut open her stomach which caused the unborn child to fall and that led the man crushing the baby’s head by repeatedly stomping on it with his foot. Since they felt as if that was not enough damage in my eyes, they then shot her with hundreds of bullets that ended up killing her.

   I almost broke down in tears when I heard about the baby being stomped on because babies are the most innocent humans in the world before they get influenced by their parents on what they feel about what is right and wrong. My people were lynched based off accusations of murder against white people and or looking, speaking, etc. to white women.

  Another lynching that we talked about was a 14-year-old boy who was from Chicago and was visiting his family members who lived down in the south. His name was Emmet Till and I was familiar with this lynching only because his mother made sure everyone knows what they did to her sweet boy. This is another heartbreak that I could not get over because seeing his face before and after the lynching leaves you with an unbearable feeling.

   I was not too fond of listening to the interviewee who had interviewed the woman who said that Emmet had catcalled her. We were only listening to blatant excuses and pity that we should be used to nowadays by racist white people. I don’t think anyone should have given her a platform to be interviewed or let her write a book because the only thing she tried to do is play victim when she brought up the fact that her husband was extremely aggressive, I was certainly not going for any of that sob story that she was trying to sell. I don’t believe that she feels guilty. I believe that she is in her dying days, and she wants to unleash all her hidden demons so she can reach the pearly white gates of heaven when in fact she’s going to hell.

   

Now as this semester slowly came to an end, I can say that I enjoyed my time being in this class learning more about African American history. This class has taught me so much and I think I’ve grown so much better as a Black young woman. I went from calling dread locs to locs because I did not know the significance and meaning behind the word dread locs. I loved this class so much that I was hoping it would have been another part of this so that I can register for it in the spring semester. I never got this kind of experience from where I’m from and when I went to HBCUs I did not get the opportunity to take it and I’m glad that I waited because Dr. Oliver teaches very beautifully.