Watching the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) documentary on the Roosevelts, and I was struck by FDRs failure to enact the anti-lynching legislation of 1938. I started researching the Roman Catholic response to lynchings in the post-bellum South. I found some Roman Catholic poets. For example, the poem The Lynching by Claude McKay (1889-1948), a Jamaican African whose grandfather had been a slave in the Caribbean. In America, McKay converted to Roman Catholicism and taught at the Catholic Youth Organization in Chicago from 1944-1948. Below is his chilling poem, The Lynching - The Lynching His spirit in smoke ascended to high heaven. His father, by the cruelest way of pain, Had bidden him to his bosom once again; The awful sin remained still unforgiven. All night a bright and solitary star (Perchance the one that ever guided him, Yet gave him up at last to Fates wild whim) Hung pitifully oer the swinging char. Day dawned, and soon the mixed crowds came to view The ghastly body swaying in the sun: The women thronged to look, but never a one Showed sorrow in her eyes of steely blue; And little lads, lynchers that were to be, Danced round the dreadful thing in fiendish glee. [1] [1] Witnessing Lynching: American Writers Respond, ed. Anne P. Rice (Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 188-190; see also 143. Claude McKay, pray for us. Ora pro nobis. Images: (L) Black Catholic poet Claude McKay (english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/m_r/mckay/mckay.htm) (R) Jesse Washington lynching 1916 (goo.gl/BncCfK)
Posted on: Mon, 22 Sep 2014 21:09:59 +0000
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