Non-Fiction

J. Chester Johnson, who grew up white in southeast Arkansas but has lived most of his adult life in New York City, is the author of Damaged Heritage: The Elaine Race Massacre and A Story of Reconciliation (May 2020, Pegasus).

In 2014, having grown up white along the cusp of the Mississippi River Delta, I discovered that my grandfather Lonnie Birch, who had been my primary caregiver during the first five years of my life, participated in the 1919 Elaine (AR) Race Massacre, possibly the worst racial attack against African-Americans in our country’s history with more than a hundred – and perhaps hundreds – of black sharecroppers and their family members perishing.

Soon after I uncovered Lonnie’s participation in the Massacre, I acknowledged my attempt, as so many American whites, especially large numbers of white Southerners, had done before me, to lessen the effects of damaged heritage – in my case, as a legacy left behind, caused by my grandfather’s role in the terrible Elaine racial conflagration.
Damaged heritage is that essential feature of American white racism, consisting of evidence passed on to succeeding generations of ingrained, prejudicial traditions and customs, sometimes codified into law, historically combined with not infrequent, gratuitous, and even savage violence and repression, perpetrated by American whites against African-Americans. For some of us whites, damaged heritage has an added personal measure for which we are not responsible, such as Lonnie’s role in the Elaine Massacre, but with which we have to deal for family members we adored and who adored us (a multiplicity of repetitive factors includible in the idea of damaged heritage is set forth in my book).
For generations, if not centuries, white folks have shielded their damaged heritage through adoption of excessive veneration of the past and traditions, a feature Webster dubs “filiopietism”. Both damaged heritage and filiopietism are serious components of continuing racism.

Indeed, the combination of filiopietism and damaged heritage has created resistance to racial change, except for a demonstration by many American whites of the desire to return regressively to an earlier period of even greater black subjugation, and has inspired defensiveness and denial instead of an impulse toward acknowledgment and reconciliation.

While few American writers are his equal as a purveyor of filiopietism – the impact of historical mythologies brought forward in time–even William Faulkner understood the terrors and tragedy a combination of damaged heritage and filiopietism exerts: “No man can cause more grief than that one clinging blindly to the vices of his ancestors.”

For a time, I hid my damaged heritage behind a deep adoration and love I admittedly held for Lonnie, so that whenever writing about or discussing his participation in this race massacre, I referred to his “likely” role, even when I knew better. It was never “likely”. Indeed, from the very moment I made the solemn connection that all evidence showed he had been part of the white onslaughts in the rich cotton fields on the Arkansas side of the Mississippi River Delta in Phillips County, I had little doubt about Lonnie’s association, and yet, “likely” had its special, assuasive appeal.

However, based on my long-time rejection of the racist apparatus and factors that surrounded me during my youth, I simply could not let my feelings and familial attachment for Lonnie obviate the racist person he had so clearly been. He then became and thereafter remained two, distinctly separate, people – a dutiful and caring grandfather, but also, for a less welcomed memory, an abhorrent gunman who sought to kill African-Americans in a 1919 mass murder.

A revelation occurred to me at the end of the struggle concerning the person I wanted Lonnie to be. As a result of this personal reckoning, I came to grasp the ability for generations of whites to tolerate, for so long, the terrible treatment of blacks in America. The influence of damaged heritage on white racism bore little potent capability to exist without psychological cover from filiopietism, which has excused, camouflaged, and sufficiently inoculated damaged heritage throughout the entirety of our national history.

So, how do we American whites rid ourselves of the causes and consequences of racism, manifested through the coupled evils of damaged heritage and filiopietism? We humans are not born with racism as a natural result of who we innately are; rather, it is a trait we absorb as a condition of what we learn and have to unlearn if we are to free ourselves of this evil.

I like to think that the commonality between all humans – let’s call it the genuinely human – far outweighs any differences in custom, history, background, skin color, language, manners, and rituals. Unfortunately, meager differences between us have too often suggested to many whites the perfect reason for exclusion, separation, and isolation of others.
With the idea of the genuinely human in mind, I like to recall comments for guidance from the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, who wrote 170 years ago, that one generation does not learn anything genuinely human from a past generation; in other words, we have to learn ever anew for ourselves the genuinely human.

In early 2014, Robert Whitaker, author of a well-regarded book on the Elaine Race Massacre, proposed that Sheila Walker, a descendant of several Elaine Massacre victims, and I meet – progeny of victims and perpetrator. For the last six years, adoption of the genuinely human proved to be the path to racial reconciliation and abiding friendship between Sheila and me and between our respective families. This story is told in detail in my book.

Kierkegaard’s view that one generation cannot rely on a previous generation to learn the genuinely human warns us that filiopietism will inevitably embrace racism, in white America’s case, since that revered past casts African-Americans mostly in a perpetual state of human subjugation. Therefore, we whites have to be especially careful about those traditions to which we adhere, for, if we’re not, they can surely contain racist substance brought forward again and again.

Yet, we should also feel eagerly challenged that we alone can open ourselves to the genuinely human, not bound by those who come before or after us. Otherwise, we will be continually plagued, as a people, by the eternal “NO”, which we sometimes call “evil” or “sin” of which racism is a vicious, elemental part.

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J. Chester Johnson, who grew up white in southeast Arkansas but has lived most of his adult life in New York City, is the author of DAMAGED HERITAGE: The Elaine Race Massacre and A Story of Reconciliation (May, 2020, Pegasus).

I grew up white along the Mississippi River Delta in southeast Arkansas, one of the most racist regions of the country and site of the Elaine Race Massacre, arguably the most significant racial attack against African-Americans in our country’s history. I was reminded as I recently watched renewed grief combusting on the streets of most of our large American cities of the truism I learned early in my life: those we whites abuse, we in turn then loathe.

How can we whites not acknowledge the cause of the black anger and frustration in response to the cavalier manner in which the lives of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd were taken? Who could not say that whites hardly showed any regard at all in the executions of these three African Americans? Indeed, we too often witness the face of indifference as black lives are casually taken away.

We now hear the call, the habitual drumbeat, once more for racial healing, but it is simply not possible to have a credible discourse on the subject of racial healing in the absence of a full admission that black lives are routinely, if not normally, treated as largely trivial by an important segment of American officialdom, including the police. How else can we account for the recurrence of white violence without consequences?

So, how do we move from whites inflicting abuse to the dismissal by whites of African-American lives? Implicit in the historical ability of whites to abuse blacks with impunity has been the related evil of seeing black lives as inferior. The various reminders of abuse one practices can be mortifying and agonizing, and can foster deep hatred, both for one’s own self as perpetrator but also toward the object or target. In the extreme, abusers can desire and seek the complete elimination of the object of one’s abuse in the belief that the strong urge behind the abuse will also simply disappear with the absence of the object or victim. Yet, this process rarely squelches the motive. The associated illusion that loathing only exists because the object deserves demonstrable hatred has led to violent outbursts reflected through lynchings and brutalizations, such as the mutilation and murder of Emmett Till, if not more recent deaths of numerous African-Americans.
And yet, many whites recognize at some level that such hatefulness exists within white identity rather than being provoked by the Other. They knew they could never save themselves from damaged heritage, that legacy of prejudicial tradition and violence derived from American white racism, perpetrated against African-Americans, and passed on and repeated from generation to generation. The traditions, the customs, the evil reflected in history against African-Americans were too ingrained and too intertwined with who those American whites were for them to cleanse themselves.

Over the seven decades of my life facing racial division and white subjugation of black people, I have witnessed time and again that whites have little capacity to cleanse themselves, as the continuous harm caused by whites against blacks, whether by abuse, loathing, or customary impulse, built up so much scar tissue over the years and generations that it became impossible for the perpetrators to penetrate into their own hidden humanity through those layers of tragedy whites had imposed.

And thus, white abuse and loathing had to persist to degradation in the value of African-American lives. I cannot be convinced that American whites, for generations, didn’t comprehend the evil nature of African-American subjugation, but they could not help themselves from following the well-worn path–clearly marked without ambiguity–which grandfathers and grandmothers, mothers and fathers also followed, so that encroachments on the past and departure from traditions simply became a form of heresy. Over multiple generations, while ancestors realized the evil nature of racial oppression, the availability of free or cheap labor and the allure of maintaining white supremacy as a way of life were much too appealing to oppose.

So, let us proceed to endorse racial healing. It is only prudent and necessary to do so as a nation. However, at the same time, let us recognize that such an effort will be futile from the outset in the absence of an initial step that leads to an admission by this country that black lives have been systemically valued less than white lives by not only governmental institutions but the public at large. Only on a foundation of a realistic acknowledgment of the past and current status for black lives in this country can we expect that such adverse behavior, as we continue to experience, will not be repeated again and again and that black lives can be viewed by all Americans as equal in value to white lives.

Credit: History News Network

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J. Chester Johnson, a poet and non-fiction writer, is author of Damaged Heritage: The Elaine Race Massacre and A Story of Reconciliation, published by Pegasus Books in May, 2020.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German martyr and theologian who fought against Hitler and the Nazis in his native country during the 1930s and early 1940s, defined “cheap grace” as grace without cost, as “grace we bestow on ourselves.” I hear many whites today defend themselves against the fearsome appellation of “racist” by announcing that they would never think about practicing the kind of behavior, shown in recent years across this country by white nationalists.

Having taken that position to convince themselves they are not racists, they nonetheless harbor only white friends, and they also attend virtually all-white religious institutions and social clubs. They live in all-white neighborhoods, and their business partners, associates, and contacts are routinely white. When we whites vindicate ourselves from racism this way, we commit the equivalency of bestowing exoneration upon ourselves.

The hurdle is very much higher if we whites have any right eventually to receive actual forgiveness by African-Americans for our white racism, both inherited and practiced. So, what are the criteria to begin the process -merely to begin the process – that can help lead us whites toward a realistic chance for such forgiveness, and ultimately, toward a path of racial reconciliation with our Black brothers and sisters?

First, we must thoroughly acknowledge, through demonstrable and sincere acceptance, the unvarnished racial prejudice and history of 400 years in the United States – without any deflective excuse from filiopietism (excessive veneration of ancestors, the past, and tradition), too often employed to ameliorate the effects of those 400 years.

We whites must, by unfettered actions and resolute ideology, accept the truth of our illegitimate and evil white American domination of African-Americans, as manifested in our “damaged heritage” – that essence of American white racism, consisting of evidence, passed on from generation to generation, of ingrained, prejudicial customs and traditions, sometimes codified into law, and historically combined with not infrequent, gratuitous, and often severe violence and repression perpetrated by American whites against African-Americans.

We whites know what has happened through our racial subjugation of African-Americans, and we have no defensible or legitimate reason whatsoever to excuse it by benefit of prideful mythologies and endless genealogies. In a very much related thought, the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard wrote 170 years ago that one generation does not learn anything “genuinely human” from a past generation; in other words, we have to learn anew for ourselves those qualities, which constitute the “genuinely human”.

Yet, those qualities that can lead us whites to the “genuinely human” to obviate our adherence to racism are not the aspects we whites have normally employed for the treatment of Blacks – rather, we have habitually relied on customs, traditions, skin color, accents, and history. But the “genuinely human” is deeper, more fundamental, instinctual as it wills a connection between us (Black and white) to understand, to empathize, to reconcile, to love, to co-inhere, to step into another’s shoes and be that person. There can be no reservation about the need for this adoption, this additional and highly significant step for whites to brook.

Still, why does any white in America need to be forgiven for past racism?

Because we carry a self-destructive legacy we routinely do not even recognize, derived from white privilege and pure white domination. Since this legacy has been with us so long and it has been so thoroughly ours, most white Americans cannot perceive or appreciate its corrosive effects or consequences for others and ourselves.

While it may not have been apparent, whites always knew, but have been unable to admit that, in truth, we can only be cleansed of that legacy and its evil nature by those we made our victims: Black brothers and sisters among us. We simply do not have the resources for exerting the forceful act of truly forgiving ourselves for the accumulation of such evil displayed through white privilege and pure white domination we foisted upon African-Americans for generations.

Notwithstanding the indispensability for this cleansing of racial legacy, the steps called for here must be unilateral steps taken by whites, steps taken without expectation of anything immediate in return, but solely for the desire, for the simple purpose of demonstrating a desire by whites to express a sincere and personal mission to empathize, to reconcile, to love, to reach out to those we have egregiously and continuously harmed in body, spirit, and mind as an inhuman cudgel of national, white policy and practice.

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J. Chester Johnson, a poet and non-fiction writer, is author of Damaged Heritage: The Elaine Race Massacre and A Story of Reconciliation, published by Pegasus Books in May, 2020.

The summer of 2013 proved especially consequential for me, occasioned by a series of four private lunches with Dr. James H. Cone, author of Black Theology & Black Power, a book that has, since its release, carried the distinction as “the founding text of Black liberation theology.” To Cone, long-time distinguished professor at Union Theological Seminary, the gospel of Christianity had been hijacked and distorted by “white, Euro-American values.”

I have come to realize the conversations I experienced that summer with Cone – just the two of us, Black and white, one on one – constituted an essential segment of my “white reckoning,” a moment in time when my racial past, impressions, and ideas came under forceful examination by a newfound and sophisticated friend, whose distant Arkansas background and my own were similar, although we viewed the subjects we explored from historically obverse realities. After all, the two of us spent our youths – I was the younger – in small towns in south Arkansas around the same time with only six years in age and a relatively short distance of fifty miles separating us.

The thoughts rushed unbridled and unmeasured into consciousness as my wife, Freda, and I sat at the funeral for Cone on Monday, May 7, 2018, nearly five years after the intense discussions he and I shared over that summer of 2013. Seating capacity at Riverside Church on the upper west side of Manhattan is just a little over 2,000. From the vantage point of the pew we occupied that day, Riverside Church overflowed with a scattering of whites amid an ocean of African-Americans. Listening to nearby conversations, I realized many attendees traveled long distances to arrive at the ceremony honoring this controversial but seminal figure of philosophical and theological importance. As the funeral progressed, I felt a thrill about the degree of respect and acceptance his Black liberation theology had obviously gained among Black people across the country.

Thrilled. I cannot think of a better word to express my response to the crowd’s puissant reaction to Cone’s views of Black life in the United States. Eulogies were plentiful that day from prominent leaders in America’s Black churches and liberation theological circles, such as Cone’s friend Dr. Cornel West, former student Raphael Warnock (then the senior minister at Martin Luther King’s Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, who would later, in 2021, be elected Georgia’s first African-American United States Senator), and Dr. Kelly Brown Douglas, Cone protégé, prominent author, and Dean of the Episcopal Divinity School at Union Theological Seminary.

At least for this white author, my prospective book cried out for the voice of James Cone. While I had the advantage of a first-hand racial reckoning with him asking questions and probing many answers, Cone’s writings called whites to task for their beliefs and behavior toward Blacks and Black liberation. In many ways like Malcolm X, his voice would be unheard at the nation’s peril.

My long 2013 article on the Elaine Race Massacre had been published in a national literary periodical, a copy of which I provided to Cone, who wanted to know more about the Elaine conflagration than my piece conveyed. He and I inherited common knowledge about the region where the massacre happened and the associated racial rituals, practices, and oppression that occurred there. We each recognized that so much about the Massacre was not unique for south Arkansas – only a matter of the slightest degree separated in 1919 a mass murder of African-Americans from a single lynching.

A geographic commonality brought us together, as he had shown considerable interest to learn much more about the Elaine Race Massacre, leading to our first luncheon in mid-June; the lunches spread over the summer, ending in late August. I was familiar with Cone’s work, having read some of his theological writings. He knew little of me but for my authorship of the Massacre piece and biographical highlights that accompanied it, unless he looked for more elsewhere.

James Hal Cone had been born August 5, 1938 in Fordyce, Arkansas, then a town of about 3,400 persons a little over forty miles northwest from my hometown of Monticello via a two-lane road – much of it would have been unpaved at that time. Eighty years ago, these two communities were about the same size. Located in the timberlands of rural south Arkansas, Fordyce’s only claim to fame during the 20th century rested on the municipality being the hometown of Paul “Bear” Bryant, legendary football coach for the University of Alabama Crimson Tide. Actually, Cone spent his youth in the smaller community of Bearden, some fourteen miles southwest of Fordyce and hosting a population of less than 1,000.

During the course of the 2013 summer, he recited for me a variety of stories about growing up in aggressively segregated south Arkansas and, more particularly, in Bearden. One such story dealt with watching a Black man being pistol whipped in town at a four-way crossing by a local white law enforcement officer; apparently, the policeman thought he had been too slow in accelerating his vehicle. Such gratuitous and arbitrary acts of violence, affront, and unfairness perpetrated by whites in and around Bearden wore on Cone for the rest of life. He often invoked his parents’ relevance and influence, sometimes summoning his father’s name, “Charlie,” seemingly to give Cone supplementary insights and additional fortitude to confront a moment of dilemma, uncertainty, or past pain.

From the outset, Cone brought to each of our lunches, as a gift, a different, personally inscribed book he had written, and from the very beginning of our conversations, I was struck by the eagerness, curiosity, and transparency of this man in his mid-70s. Throughout the summer, stories of Cone’s life in Arkansas, including the years he spent in Little Rock studying at Shorter College and Philander Smith College before moving on to receive his doctorate from Northwestern University, would stream from him unencumbered. While a student in Arkansas, he held a job as chauffeur for a prominent Little Rock businessman, with the “n-word” freely employed by his employer’s associates and colleagues from the backseat of the automobile. Recounting these stories of being a chauffeur, Cone still remained incensed at the ignominy of having to don the obligatory driver’s cap as part of his job.

Cone showed insistence at learning as much as possible about me: What was it like being white and teaching in the all African-American school in Monticello before integration, and what was the response then to my efforts from the local communities, both Black and white? How did my family react to my views and actions? How did I come to read much Dietrich Bonhoeffer? How did my views about race develop to differ so tellingly from whites in south Arkansas, particularly from my own family? What did I think of James Baldwin and Malcolm X? Did the Episcopal Church make any reparations in connection with its apology and national day of repentance for the Church’s role in transatlantic slavery, using a litany which I wrote at the Church’s request? How and why did I become so committed to the first physical memorial to the Elaine Race Massacre? Conducting a deluge of weighty, but sometimes intimidating questions, he was continuously and implacably inquisitive, this renowned professor at prestigious Union Theological Seminary, where he had taught since 1969, this man of profound humility, who, notwithstanding his enviable oeuvre of remarkable compositions, complained about his writing skills and the great difficulty he faced putting word after word on paper.

He freely described and discussed the myriad of crucial subjects that occupied his focus and ruminations, including the steps and circumstances that brought him to Black liberation theology; his regular criticism of Reinhold Niebuhr’s neglect of Black plight in Detroit and New York City, two cities where Niebuhr had been quite active; our mutual attention to the Detroit riots, the City of Detroit, and surrounding Wayne County, Michigan (two local governments I served as a consultant earlier in my life and career); his belief that Black people habitually hide their more visceral comments about white people; the Million Man March; his view that white subjugation of African-Americans thrusts a higher burden of original sin on white folks; and our mutual recall of the integration of Little Rock Central High School, which happened in 1957 as I became a teenager and Cone was nineteen years old.

Our final lunch in late August, 2013 proved to be the least satisfying – for us both, I believe. The conversation started very uncharacteristically with personal recriminations by Cone. He accused me, citing verbally an identical shortcoming for all whites, of not paying enough attention to Malcolm X. He additionally upbraided me, referencing and castigating whites as a group generally, for not understanding Black circumstances and attitudes. Shortly into this unexpected jeremiad, I received a telephone call notifying me that my wife unpredictably needed to go to the hospital, and I should meet her there as soon as possible. Cone’s demeanor shifted instantly and dramatically, demonstrating much concern and sympathy, but I needed to dash. So, our relationship ended quite abruptly and unsatisfactorily. He exhibited irritation with me for reasons that are still baffling, and I, in turn, felt offended at his aggression. We never reached out to each other again.

As a result of these summertime lunches with Dr. James H. Cone, I have often pondered and attempted to answer the conundrum I have never been fully able to answer – that is, why did he desire to continue many lengthy discussions with me? We never really had a detailed agenda for any one of our talks. Until the very end, each of our meetings carried the redolent purpose of friends meeting for no reason other than to share notable experiences and personal propositions. After thinking about this question for years, I have resolved that I probably represented an opportunity for Cone to enter into a previously unrealized conversation he envisioned with a white person from his past who would willingly acknowledge and comprehend the life in Bearden and south Arkansas that Cone endured and overcame from the 1940s and 1950s. Is it wrong of me to surmise that four summer lunches in 2013 created a retrospective for James Cone that brought his own history and views into clearer focus against a backdrop of passage with a white man?

Credit: History News Network

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The Spring 2022 issue of American Book Review includes a review of Damaged Heritage by Robert Whitaker. I have received permission to share this article with you.

American Book Review
Volume 43, Number 1, Spring 2022 University of Nebraska Press
Reviewed by:
Robert Whitaker

As the 1619 Project reminds us, our nation’s damaged heritage stretches back more than four centuries, to the moment that the first Africans were brought to the New World to labor under the yoke of slavery, and here we are today, still in need of protests that proclaim, “Black Lives Matter,” and still hearing of resistance to teaching this history in our schools. Readers of J. Chester Johnson’s aptly titled book, Damaged Heritage: The Elaine Race Riot and a Story of Reconciliation, will recognize that although his story is autobiographical, he serves as an Everyman, telling of a need for us all to confront this past, which so infects our present. His deep friendship with Sheila Walker serves a model for moving forward with a shared understanding of history.

This is a book about escaping from the talons of our damaged heritage, so infused with racism, violence, and a societal narrative that turns a blind eye to such facts. Johnson has a particular heritage that haunts him. After his father died when he was not yet two, he spent his preschool years in Little Rock with his grandparents. His grandfather Lonnie doted on him, and some of his earliest memories are of sitting in Lonnie’s lap. Yet, years later, he would come to understand that Lonnie had been a member of the Ku Klux Klan, donning the white sheet on many nights, and that he had been a member of the mob that killed Black sharecroppers in Phillips County, Arkansas, in 1919.

In an imaginary letter to Lonnie, Johnson writes: [End Page 85]

“While I have unreservedly written here and accepted that you are part of me, you cannot be in fact and in sum, for consciously and unabashedly, I abhor that part of you who pursued a massacre of blacks, you who could mortify, terrorize, burn, or lynch, and then claim the rightness of it all with an allegiance to the proposition of superiority for a white coterie.”

Although it is always difficult to know why one person retains the values of the culture they grew up in while another breaks from those values, there was an early experience in Johnson’s life that prepared him for the latter course. In 1949, when his mother moved their family to Monticello, his backyard was adjacent to a field that, on the opposite side, was home to Black families. There, in this no-man’s land, they played pick-up games of baseball with young Chester, the only white child, and yet everyone also knew the rules: his Black friends would never be invited into his home, and the opposite was true too.

Those friendships proved fleeting once Chester developed new friends at the all-white elementary school, and that remained true for the rest of his youth. However, upheaval to Arkansas’s Jim Crow world came in 1957, when nine Black students integrated the Little Rock High School, with white mobs hurling insults and threats as they entered the school under the protection of federal troops. Johnson’s early friendship with Black children prompted him to begin to separate himself-at least in his mind-from those who would countenance such hate.

Chester went off to Harvard, but after the Summer of 1964, when Freedom Riders went to Mississippi to register Black voters, he dropped out and returned to Arkansas. He traveled widely, occasionally sleeping in his car, intent on better understanding the South and its residents. At the end of that journey, he often spoke with an older Black man who lived in the woods outside Monticello, the two of them drinking whiskey together. After earning a degree from the University of Arkansas, he spent the turbulent year of 1969 teaching at a Black school in Monticello and running for mayor. He knocked on every door in town during that effort, which, when accompanied by a Black friend, provided him the opportunity to be with the Black community in their homes. [End Page 86]

He lost that election, having narrowly escaped a beating by the local “peckerwoods” who didn’t cotton to his teaching at the local Black school and, having “foresworn being a white Southerner, burdened with its persona from a damaged heritage,” he moved to New York City. There he attained professional success as a “public finance specialist,” serving as Deputy Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury Department under Jimmy Carter.

In 2008, Johnson was selected by the Episcopal Church to write the Litany of Offense and Apology for a National Day of Repentance, which served as a formal apology by the church for its role in transatlantic slavery. While working on that project, he read Ida B. Wells’s account of The Arkansas Race Riot (1920), and this was the moment when his damaged heritage came fully to light.

While there has been a great deal of attention during the past year to the Tulsa Race Massacre in 1921, the Elaine Massacre is much less well known, and only in recent years has it entered the history books.

That fall, sharecroppers in the southern part of Phillips County began organizing a union to wage a legal fight for their fair share of the revenue from the cotton crop that year. Late in the evening of September 30th, they were meeting in a roadside church in Hoop Spur, a few miles north of Elaine, when a car pulled up outside and cut its lights. There was an exchange of gunfire, and when the smoke cleared, the church was riddled with bullet holes and a white security agent for the Missouri-Pacific railroad was lying dead in the road next to his Model T. The next morning, posses from Helena descended on the area, shooting sharecroppers hiding in the Govan Slough; next, mobs from outside the county came and began a more indiscriminate killing of Blacks in the area; and finally, Army troops from Little Rock arrived, chasing sharecroppers into the canebrakes and, as white newspapers reported, the rat-a-tat­tat of their machine guns filled the air.

What Johnson now understood was that the grandfather he adored, who in 1919 was working for the Missouri-Pacific Railroad, stationed in nearby McGeHee, had gone to Hoop Spur and participated in the killing of the Black sharecroppers.

His reconciliation with Sheila Walker crossed this vast historical divide. Her great grandmother, Sallie Giles, and her two sons, Albert and Milligan, were in the church the night it was shot up. The next morning, as a Helena [End Page 87] posse descended on their cabin, Albert and Milligan fled to the slough to hide. Albert was shot in the head, the bullet passing through his skull, and fifteen-year-old Milligan was shot in the face. Remarkably, both survived, and then came more white violence for the Giles family: the two were imprisoned for having participated in what white authorities described as a “conspiracy” by Blacks to kill the plantation owners and take over their lands. Albert was condemned to die in the electric chair, but eventually was saved from that fate by the extraordinary legal work of Scipio African us Jones, a case that led to a Supreme Court decision in Moore v. Dempsey that served as a legal foundation for the Civil Rights movement.

Sheila Walker passed earlier this year, and one wishes that there was a biography of her life that could be read alongside Johnson’s. Hers is a story of a family that continued to suffer from our unequal society, Walker and her siblings growing up desperately poor in a crowded Chicago apartment. In the 1960s, as a member of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, Walker participated in protests, sit-ins, and other Civil Rights struggles. While she eventually escaped the poverty of her youth, several of her siblings did not, their lives ransacked by drugs.

Much like Chester Johnson, she never heard anyone speak directly about the Elaine Massacre, although in 1973 her grandmother Annie, while telling of living in Phillips County, began to cry hysterically while describing a night when the Hoop Spur church had been shot up. Something awful had happened to her family, but it wasn’t until she read Grif Stockley’s 2001 book Blood in Their Eyes and other accounts of the massacre that this history became known to her.

When Chester Johnson and Sheila Walker first spoke, they took pains to come to a common understanding of the history of the Elaine Massacre, which was essential to their subsequent reconciliation. There had long been a white version, which in essence told of a Black riot that had been put down by white authorities with only fifteen to twenty Blacks killed, and there had long been a Black version, which told of a massacre of one hundred or more Blacks, and as they had both read everything they could about the subject, they both agreed that the latter was true.

From there, an extraordinary friendship developed. The two talked regularly on the phone and they spoke together at multiple public events, where [End Page 88] those in the audience could see the affection and respect they had for each other. Sheila Walker was a person of extraordinary grace, who could speak eloquently about Black Liberation and the need for a national reconciliation in this country, and as Johnson relates, it was she who counseled him that he needed to forgive his grandfather Lonnie for what he had done in 1919.

“People aren’t bad,” she told him. “Circumstances make people do bad things.”

Johnson, who has won praise for his books of poetry, is a gifted writer. Damaged Heritage is part memoir, part history, and part essay on racism, all tied together by a story of a friendship that transcended the racial gulf that so regularly plagues our country. Throughout, he reflects on our damaged heritage as a nation and how it remains so difficult for our society to confront this heritage.

This book provides a model for doing so, starting with the teaching and acceptance of a shared narrative of our country’s history, and then calling on our better selves to foster a national reconciliation.

Robert Whitaker is the author of On the Laps of Gods: The Red Summer of 1919 and the Struggle for Justice that Remade a Nation (2008).

Copyright© 2022 American Book Review – Permission given to J. Chester Johnson