Why We Forget

We live in a country whose population has not acquired the habit of taking historical memory seriously…. But histories never leave us for another inaccessible place. They are a part of us; they inhabit us and we inhabit them even when we are not aware of this relationship to history. —Angela Davis

On December 7^th, 1896, in Irondale, Alabama, William Wardley was lynched by an armed mob of white residents.  The following account has been reconstructed from the historical research, documenting the nearly 400 victims of racial terror lynching, conducted in Alabama by the Equal Justice Initiative and Margaret Weinberg, past Fellow for the Jefferson County Memorial Project.

On that day, with his two companions, Mr. Wardley stopped in a grocery store in Irondale to purchase a nickel’s worth of apples. The merchant wouldn’t accept Mr. Wardley’s money, believing it was counterfeit. Based on this accusation, a white mob, which included a local minister and a police constable, was formed and pursued Mr. Wardley and his companions. The lynch mob ultimately shot Mr. Wardley to death. His body was found along a railroad track a mile and a half outside Irondale. His two companions escaped.

After Mr. Wardley’s lynching, the Treasury Department investigated the counterfeit claim, and showed that the money was real. The Treasury Department’s report does not mention Mr. Wardley’s death.

Though this report confirmed that the money Mr. Wardley was using was not counterfeit, white residents in Irondale continued to maintain that it was—and that this justified the actions of the lynch mob. The white press, moreover, attempted to explain away Mr. Wardley’s lynching, suggesting that he had either killed himself to avoid being taken into custody for his alleged crime, or that he had accidently fallen on and discharged his own gun.

No one was ever held accountable for Mr. Wardley’s lynching. No records provide background for Mr. Wardley. His age, family, and residence are unknown. His burial site, too, is unknown.

The absence of biographical information in all accountings of Mr. Wardley’s lynching, and the focus on his alleged crime in the official Treasury Department investigation rather than on the murder itself, showcase a form of historical oppression—an erasure of his life from the record. This erasure, as a result, has also occurred in the historical memory of Irondale itself. Irondale has erased its history of racial terror violence from its past.

In other words, Mr. Wardley suffered multiple deaths on December 7^th, 1896. 

He suffered an initial death as the antiblack presumptions about his guilt and dangerousness that preceded him overdetermined whom the grocery store merchant “saw” during the initial encounter. The white merchant “knew” who Mr. Wardley was, on account of his blackness, without ever actually meeting him. Mr. Wardley suffered another death as the re-construction of his final moments was designed to freeze him in place.  In the public record, Mr. Wardley became the figure that white racists accused him of being.

The Irondale Memorial Coalition is working toward confronting this historical erasure.

As a coalition, we have three goals:

First, we aim to memorialize Mr. Wardley.

Second, we aim to educate Irondale about our community’s history of racial terror violence.

Third, we aim to advocate for solutions to instances of racial injustice today.

We do this work alongside the Jefferson County Memorial Project, the Equal Justice Initiative, and similar community remembrance coalitions across the country.

Our first act in confronting Irondale’s history of racial terror was to collect soil from Irondale’s ground. 

We did this, first, as an act of public recognition of William Wardley’s lynching. As with most victims of racial terror lynching, Mr. Wardley’s lynching has not been acknowledged; he has not been remembered. Nor have we adequately confronted the systemic antiblackness that made his lynching possible. Toward that end, we also collected soil in an effort, to borrow some of the language from the Equal Justice Initiative’s community remembrance project, “to build a lasting and more visible memory of our history of racial injustice.”

The soil we collected, in effect, stands as a concrete reminder of reality. 

Finally, we collected soil as a part of a broader community remembrance project in Irondale to ensure that those who participated in Mr. Wardley’s lynching—and that those institutions of power, like Irondale’s churches, its city government, and law enforcement, that either supported the racial terror violence or looked the other way—do not have the final say on his life. A businessman starts a rumor. A mob of white citizens, likely representing all facets of society, organize themselves to take matters into their own hands. A minister joins the crowd. So, too, does a local police constable. For both a religious leader and someone charged with enforcing the law, Mr. Wardley was guilty because he was black. After the lynching, the sheriff doesn’t press charges. The Treasury Department fails to investigate the murder. In other words, it took a community to murder Mr. Wardley.

The beginning stage of the project—the soil collection—engages the first aim: to memorialize. That this process involves removing matter from the ground and archiving it in a container is significant.

In contexts where black death and suffering are treated as myth, denied, or presented as events having occurred elsewhere, collecting soil on or near the sites where the terror violence took place is symbolic of what is for some a most uncomfortable fact: this violence is homegrown, produced in this soil; it occurred here, in this place. This is an important acknowledgement, especially in what it does to militate against a prevailing attitude among Americans that we are somehow exceptional in our ethical treatment of others. This isn’t true. And yet, Americans, through various modes of disassociation and ideological veiling, have been able to achieve considerable distance from our repugnant past with consequences in our unfortunate present, enabling those who most benefit from its inheritance to evade responsibility. In this way, then, the soil collection is an effort to establish a proximate relationship with the past. It brings near the fact that violence perpetuated against black people was (and still is) not at all aberrational but has been and continues to be crucial in outlining the contours of American citizenship. From this view, the soil collection is construed as a form of evidence, a reminder that this history occurred, human beings’ lives were lost, and that we are still living in this terror’s wake.

Memorializing is difficult and complicated work. The decision to commit to public memory something, someone, or some event is a statement of value. It is an annunciation that something or someone is worth remembering and has purchase on reality, and so the memory should be carried forward. The move, then, to insert into our collective consciousness a revised version of the past is at the same time an effort to reconfigure a social perspective on worth. This invariably involves struggle because calling forth a different set of memories and bringing aspects of our shared history into fuller view, not only challenges existing collective memory networks, but also calls into question the political and social projects they buoy.

We know that keeping intact historical accounts that blot out or minimize the severity of black terror violence perpetuates the idea that black people aren’t human beings whose lives are worth preserving, that they aren’t human beings at all. Reality, then, continues to conform itself around this idea. By renegotiating the boundaries of our collective memory, we invite into our consciousnesses an alternative view of those whom we ought to consider valuable. This is a primary aim of our memorial project—rearticulating the inherent worth of black people as human beings. In this way, we see memory work as value-work.

There are, of course, other reasons individuals might choose to forget racialized violence aimed at black people. Some enter into a state of selective amnesia—either deliberate or dissociative—because the memories of the suffering are too terrible to retain consciously; they are experienced as a weight on the individual’s capacity to continue on. This is much the case for many slaves, those who both experienced and/or bore witness to a great degree of violence. Toni Morrison, for example, in her short essay, “The Site of Memory,” invokes the slave narrative to convey the idea that, for black people having endured much pain, forgetting enters in as a mode of survival. This took shape, Morrison noted, in how slave narrative authors would “pull the narrative up short” using phasing such as “But let us drop a veil over these proceedings too terrible to relate” (237).

There’s much pain in drudging up such memories, the remembrance of which might affect one’s ability to carry on in the present and imagine the possibility of a future, one not so mired in pain. Fearing the violence’s durability—of its attritional capacity to wear down over time­ and space—some may even elect to withhold details from their children and other descendants. So, for the sake of pressing on, some of the particulars of the experience(s) get obscured, details are lost, veiled. One forgets. Remembering is too terrible.

Saidaya Hartman in her book, Lose Your Mother, testifies to this. She mentioned how her great-great grandmother, when interviewed and asked to recount her experience as a slave, responded flatly that she remembered “not a thing” (15). This admission prompted Hartman to contemplate the use-value of forgetting. For individuals like Hartman’s great-great grandmother—those having endured immense trauma—forgetting carries with it “the possibility of a new life” (15). In other words, for some, surviving involves creating a rupture between one’s past and present in order to feel less gripped by the pain and suffering caused by previous traumatic and violent encounters.

It’s important to note that the presumed need for a rupture of this sort emerges out of the dissonance the individual experiences when attempting to make one’s memories legible within existing collective frameworks for evaluating and articulating definitions for things like justice, freedom, civic responsibility, and citizenship. We are led to believe that the history of black terror violence in the United States is contained squarely within the past, having no leakage into the future (McKittrick XVII). This sentiment has grave implications; it forecloses the possibility for any kind of public deliberation centered around the ways in which this most heinous past continues to shape us.

Yet, those whose everyday lives continue to be molded by the legacy of racial terror violence know, at the level of experience, that we carry our histories within and around us. What often occurs, then, is that black people—subjects thought existentially to inhabit the realm of the “unreal,” having therefore no legitimate claim on reality—met with “reality” itself, are compelled to disassociate themselves from histories and erase memories which might present as a contradiction.

In other words, instead of attempting to resolve the set of problems exposed in the contradiction brought about by introducing competing memory claims, black people become viewed as problem-people, as those whose insistence on “bringing up old stuff” gets construed as an impingement on society’s capacity to move forward. Thus, instead of laying claim to the space of contradiction as a pathway for truth-telling and collective healing, black people sometimes seek instead to expunge what they are told is the source of the problem—memories that present a challenge to antiblack values, politics, and ways of living.

It is in this sense that Morrison understood why slave narrative writers chose to drop the “veil over these proceedings too terrible to relate.” She argued that “in shaping the experience to make it palatable to those who were in a position to alleviate it, they were silent about many other things, and they ‘forgot’ many other things.” Once again, we see how Morrison’s words reveal these other motivations for forgetting.  Historical accounts of black suffering were—and in some ways still are—rendered inconveniences, as offensive to the consciousnesses of white people. To that end, black people had to remain careful to not too aggressively (or at all) do what Angela Davis refers to as “pricking the consciousness” of white America—too heavy-handed a penetration risked inciting backlash, which is to say, more pain, more suffering (183).

But why backlash?

As our present is intimately tied to the past, collective memory and projects of forgetting figure centrally into the stories we wish to tell about ourselves in the present. We selectively summon details about the past that enable a smoother telling of these stories and omit others that challenge our efforts to do so. A simple, cursory look, for instance, into most public schools’ curricula and their omissions tells that America’s deep and fraught history of racial terror falls into the latter category of events as it relates to the construction of a coherent American identity. In other words, stories like that of Mr. Wardley, are disruptive in what they do remind that the many people whose lives that were lost or damaged as a result of racial terror, were indeed people.

We must ask: What—in the forgetting, in the intentional blanketing over of this very painful, protracted, violent past—are we wishing to say about ourselves? What about our identities are problematically kept intact by blurring out this history? And, importantly, what kind individuals might we become if we bear witness to it and all of its pain?

Forgetting matters for both individuals and communities. For individuals, there are likely a cluster of reasons for why we forget: shame; guilt; rage about being asked to be accountable; and conflicts with personal self-image or morality come to mind. Even if communities don’t have feelings, they do have stories, a narrative about themselves. And much like for individuals, some combination of shame, guilt, and so forth are the reasons why communities forget. To put this differently, forgetting is a function of power—of who has the capacity to erase from the record.  

Though sometimes painful and fraught, there is much promise and hope in remembering. Engaging the past and calling forth accounts of black people being mercilessly harmed and killed by whites challenge the veracity of a set of tenacious narratives, those that—in their minimization and normalizing of black suffering—reinforce the presumption that social relations are fixed, that whites are superior, and that blacks in their ostensible inferiority, are deserving of suffering. But in remembering, in reminding ourselves, where possible, of the names of the slain, the mutilated, and the violated, we seek to press against and undo those prevailing assumptions. We intend to deploy memory to, as Wole Soyinka put it, act as a weight “against the violations of the present” (20).  

As the Irondale Memorial Project, we remember Mr. Wardley, and in doing so take part in the broad effort to read his and the lives of so many other victims into the record of our collective memories. In this way, we believe that our work adds to what Ida B. Wells referred to as a “contribution to truth,” a truth that we hope will inspire us all into action toward fashioning a world in which we recognize the inherent worth of all individuals.

Briefly, looking ahead

Among the goals of the Irondale Memorial Project is to erect a historical marker in memory of Mr. Wardley.

We end this essay with some comments about where we hope to place the marker.

Mr. Wardley’s lynching wasn’t the result of the behavior of individual bad actors, of the choices of a few people, or the intentions of a tyrant. He was lynched rather, as Iris Marion Young writes, because of causes “embedded in unquestioned norms, habits and symbols, in the assumptions underlying institutional rules and the collective consequences of following these rules” (41). To put that differently, Mr. Wardley was lynched as a “normal procedure of everyday life” in Irondale in 1896 (41).

The Irondale Memorial Project’s preferred placement site, in front of Irondale City Hall, was selected to acknowledge this systemic nature of racial terror violence in Irondale. It accomplishes this goal, most immediately, by directly implicating local institutions of power in Mr. Wardley’s lynching. We want to place the marker in front of City Hall because City Hall was involved in the lynching. The placement site corresponds to some of the language we have chosen to include on the marker, where we insist that the same system of racial terror that claimed Mr. Wardley’s life persists today in our system of police violence and mass incarceration. For this reason, Irondale City Hall, which is situated across the street from the Irondale police department, is an important place to locate a marker that insists on official recognition of a community’s history of racial terror violence.