A spoken word piece by Charlotte artist Hannah Hasan
It is an institution as old as racism is long
Rooted in hatred
Used to inflict pain and fear
Tortured thousands and thousands all over this nation
As American as slavery
It happened here
Racial terror lynchings
A mob of people putting a person to death without court sanctions, without a trial
With rage
With pain
With fury
White men
Murdering Black men
Make themselves law enforcer
Executioner
Judge
and jury
It is torture
Hanging
Bodies buried alive
Dragged by trucks
Gunned down
Beat to death with whips and chains
It is
Bodies dismembered
In group gatherings
It is public displays
Of vicious attacks
Murderous acts
It is revenge tactics
It is human slaughter
Taking justice into one’s own hands
Group killings
It’s their version of law and order
It is a brutal reminder
It’s a message that is clear
A dastardly disgrace
At the center of our culture
It happened all over this country
And it happened here
Beneath the buildings and towers
The skyscrapers and glass ceilings that tease that beautiful, grand skyline
Beneath the sports arenas and football fields
The parks and parkways
That fulfill their promise of light moments
Of joy and ease and of good times
There is dark in this land
There is blood at the roots
There is injustice fertilizing the soil
Bearing life
Growing fruit
One life cycle at a time
From one generation to the next
This injustice
Will grab hold of your future
It won’t let you forget
If will remind you every opportunity it gets
It will manifest itself in systems
It will show you that things are never as just as they might appear
It will require you to remember and react
Though we can not get life back
We must remember it happened here
We must remember
The life taken with no regard
The unyielding pain that it cost that person’s family
Or the gaping hole that it left in their community
Or the fact that their murder becomes their story and their legacy
That hatred so deep could make a group of others rob another human of living and dying in dignity
That to stand in watch as a life is taken without empathy
Without pain
Without hurt
Without feeling something, anything
Is the greatest of all tragedies
We must remember the tragedies
Remember that it happened here
That it happened to those occupying this space
The people
The injustice
The cruelty
Is a sad, cold reality
That can not and will not ever be replaced
There is a haunting over this land
And those who question why we need to conjure up these spirits
Why we need to unearth this pain
Often benefit from silence
Some continue to perpetuate the violence
Maybe their grandparents and great-great-grandparents were compliant
Or maybe they once took justice into their own hands
And for generation after generation, they have chosen to deny it
So we stand in the truth of what has transpired
Listen with broken hearts
To the stories that have stained this land
Hate the history with every ounce of our existence
While seeking to repair and maybe understand
The generational impact of this brand of trauma
And everything that it will take to heal a pain that has been compounded for over 100 years
We honor that a step forward in the process
Is allowing ourselves space to process
The truth of racial terror lynchings
Is that it happened here.
2021 Hermitage Fellow Hannah Hasan is an award-winning, highly acclaimed spoken word poet, speaker, and storyteller who believes that our stories can set us free.
AT TOP: Hasan performing the work at Bank of America Stadium, site of Joe McNeely’s death. / Loyd Visuals