Robert A. Rees: Time to root out anti-Black prejudice

Until March of this year, there was no federal law against lynching in the United States. That law, the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act, was signed into law by President Biden an astonishing 100 years after the first attempt to pass such a law!

It is appropriate that the bill bears the name of Till, a handsome 14-year Black boy from Chicago who, while on a trip to visit relatives in Mississippi in 1955, was kidnapped, brutally tortured and lynched — supposedly for speaking in “too friendly a manner” to a white woman in a grocery store.

Compounding the injustice, Till’s accused murderers were found not guilty by an all-white jury.

That it took 157 years following the Civil War to pass a law against so barbarous and violent an act is scandalous. In those intervening years, more than 6,000 Black men, women and children were lynched, including many during the 20th century.

While the vast majority of lynchings took place in the South, some took place in other states, including in Utah where in 1925 Robert Marshall, a Black coal miner from Arkansas living in Carbon County, falsely accused of murder, was hanged by an angry mob that included an estimated 1,000 spectators. None of the 11 citizens accused of Marshall’s murder was ever brought to trial.

Until I saw the new film “Till,” released in theaters this past week, I was not fully aware of the horrific violence of his murder or of his mother’s courageous decision to have an open casket at his funeral, making his mutilated body visible to the world, or that his murder had been the catalyst that led to President Dwight Eisenhower signing the Civil Rights Act in 1957.

Until I made my first trip to the Deep South just a year after Till’s murder, I hadn’t been fully aware that such blatant acts of violent racism were part of the fabric of American life. Even though I grew up in a racist family, lived in a series of racist communities and attended schools and congregations where racism was often visible, I wasn’t prepared for what I saw in Georgia.

Fresh off a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I joined the Army and was sent to Ft. Gordon to train as a military policeman. I was shocked the first time I saw segregated public transportation, drinking fountains and swimming pools and was especially unnerved to pass through what was known as a “Sundown Town” - a sign outside of Georgia town that read, “Black Man, don’t let the sun set on your head in this town.”

That was the beginning of my awakening to the deep and persistent history of racism in America and of my personal responsibility to root it out of my own life and to work for justice for my black brothers and sisters.

While the hanging of Robert Marshall in Utah in 1925 is called “the last lynching in the West,” it was not by any means the last violent racial act nor the last symbolic lynching. We know from recent events in the state that racism is very much alive here. In fact, there are almost weekly reminders of how far we have yet to go to root out anti-Black prejudice.

Latter-day Saints especially should be working to end racism, as our scriptures state clearly that “all are alike unto God ... black and white.”

If all are alike unto God, how could they possibly not also be alike unto us? Until they are, they cannot be free, and we cannot be free, or call ourselves the children of God.

Robert A. Rees, Ph.D., is an independent scholar and co-founder and president of FastForward for the Planet, a newly-formed Utah foundation that unifies the world’s faiths in addressing climate issues.