After Zimmerman’s acquittal, the co-founders of the BLM movement, Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi, demanded accountability for anti-black violence. In bringing the rash of legal lynchings into the national spotlight, the movement challenged public perceptions about the value of black life. For Du Bois, to counteract the phenomenon of the color line, the American public must be compelled to witness the black experience of America and to recognize that it stands in stark contradiction to democratic ideals. Not only do democratic institutions continue to fail to protect the most vulnerable members of the polity. The American public casts doubt about whether black lives are really in harm’s way. Many resent the call to even pay attention to the possible racial dimension of policing practices; the color line thus obscures racial realities. As a consequence, the basic right to life – to have one’s fair shot at being-in-the-world – is denied to African Americans; and it is extremely difficult to build more nuanced claims to justice when one’s basic right to exist is insecure. Hence the radical power of the assertion that black lives matter.
In chapter 13 of Souls, Du Bois depicted the fictional tale of a young black man, John Jones, who has returned to his hometown of Altamaha, Georgia after receiving a college degree in the North. A white mob lynches Jones for defending his sister against a white rapist. Du Bois narrated Jones’s last thoughts:
Amid the trees in the dim morning twilight he watched their shadows dancing and heard their horses thundering towards him, until at last they came sweeping like a storm, and he saw in front [a] haggard white-haired man, whose eyes flashed red with fury. Oh, how he pitied him, – pitied him, – and wondered if he had the coiling twisted rope. Then, as the storm burst round him, he rose slowly to his feet and turned his closed eyes towards the Sea.
And the world whistled in his ears.6
Though fictional, Du Bois’s account of the last moments of Jones’s life represents a moral truth about what it means to be a victim of racist violence. Jones was “swept like a storm” by the mob and, even as they asserted their gross claim to his physical body, he “pitied” his executioners; Jones saw their souls distorted by fury and fear in a way that they could not see themselves. In pitying his executioners, Jones asserted his spiritual sovereignty over them – that a vital portion of his self will not bend to their will. Of course, spiritual sovereignty can seem wanting against the destruction of the physical body. Du Bois’s insight here, I submit, illuminates black insight into white souls disfigured by bigotry and asserts the right to black hope for liberation. “But not even this was able to crush all manhood and chastity and aspiration from black folk.”7 In his stark rendering of the white soul, for Du Bois, their “pitiful” deeds cannot be the final judgment about, and summation of, what it means to be a human being; instead, he cemented the victims of lynch mobs as the rightful judges of America, as those whose souls must live on in our collective consciousness. So too the Black Lives Matter movement upholds the value of the black lives lost and elevates their experience of violence as the true reflection of American racial realities. “We must exalt,” implored Du Bois, “the Lynched above the Lyncher, and the Worker above the Owner, and the Crucified above Imperial Rome.”8
After Reconstruction, lynching mobs exploded across the United States. Between 1882 and 1968, historians estimate 3,500 African Americans were killed. The destruction of the black body was a public festival, complete with the sale of photographs and souvenirs of the cut-up bits of the victims’ bodies. In Dusk of Dawn, Du Bois recounted that when he found Sam Hose’s knuckles on display in a shop window in Atlanta in 1899, a recent victim of a lynch mob, his faith in science as a tool for racial justice reform wavered.9 Fact-based arguments alone could not stop anti-black violence or the family picnics around the burnt and mutilated remains of black people. He began to search for a more expansive way to combat the celebration of and complicity in racial terror. This history of violence has left a psychological imprint on the collective consciousness of the republic and today motivates, if not the celebration, then indifference and resentment against a movement to end police brutality. White nationalist groups have turned into an increasingly well-organized social force that seeks to reclaim the republic as a de jure racial caste system, reaffirming it as a white ethno-state. Today, as in the past, the claim that black lives matter is, in Baldwin’s words, a spiritual “cross” that the republic bears: the recognition, or the lack thereof, of black lives continues to define its character and shapes the history of its future.10 According to Du Bois, whenever the republic comes to value black life just a little more, it ushers in the radical reconstruction of modern American society.
The black lives lost
Recall that the color line withdraws respect and esteem from people of color in general and from African Americans in particular. Though it cultivates a broad focus on racial realities, the Black Lives Matter movement highlights the racist violence perpetuated and condoned by the state. To be sure, the federal government had enabled the scourge of lynching of the Jim Crow era, passing an anti-lynching bill in 2018, a century after the bill was first introduced in the Senate. Legal inaction fueled white mobs. This meant that local law enforcement assured impunity for murderers, and police officials often played a role in lynchings, handing over victims to mobs, standing idle, or lighting the match themselves. The passage of the anti-lynching bill is a symbol of the ongoing fight for accountability for racist police violence as much as it is a symbol of the complicity of the state and law enforcement, then as now.
Du Bois believed that bearing witness to anti-black violence and the resultant trauma shapes the historical legacy of black liberation struggles against white supremacy. In his fictional and journalistic portrayals of the black lives lost to racial violence, Du Bois wanted to stir in his reader a sense of compassion and shared grief with the segregated black community. He endeavored to portray the singular and irreplaceable lives lost; and sometimes leaned on poetic depictions of a person’s subjective consciousness that is snuffed out in death. Given the sheer number of deaths and the lack of quality investigative journalism, with the exception of the efforts of Ida B. Wells and black-owned presses, it is difficult to track all the victims of anti-black violence over the centuries and to tell the story of their lives. Even today, the few names reported by the press represent a fraction of the many lives lost; and headlines often exclude black women and members of the trans community whose lives are notably at risk. For Du Bois, the task of political critique is to defend the humanity of the vulnerable, while also capturing the vast scale of anti-black violence and disenfranchisement without reifying the lost lives into a statistic or an abstract status of “victimhood.” His intuition was that empathizing with the individual behind the statistic would help the public resist the passive acceptance of white supremacist ideology and violence as a customary feature of modern American life.
The Black Lives Matter movement captures the black lives lost in routine policing practices across the country. By bringing attention to each individual victim with his or her diverse family background, gender, and class, the movement showcases how racial blackness mediates the public’s perception of threat and exposes black lives to police violence.
Consider the brief life of Tamir Rice. In 2014, 12-year-old Rice was playing with a toy gun in a Cleveland park and a white man waiting for a bus called 911 to report him as an armed belligerent. Within seconds of arriving on the scene, a white officer fatally shot Tamir in the chest. On the day he died, his mother, Samaria, had packed him a turkey sandwich for lunch and had given him a few dollars to buy chips and juice from the corner store. Tamir still enjoyed playing with Lego and a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle video game; he was inseparable from his 14-year-old sister, Tajai. The Rice family had moved to the neighborhood in part to be close to the park in which Tamir was eventually killed. His older sister was the first to rush to her dying brother before the officer who had shot him tackled and arrested her as Tamir lay dying.
Consider, too, the brief life of Freddie