In this blog post about the murder...
Aside: I say murder because a 14 year old Black boy found guilty and sentenced to death in one day by a court house full of White male jurors, all White spectators, and a White Judge in 1944 rural South Carolina is murder
...of George Junius Stinney Jr., I became horrified by the desire of the blogger to declare the system just despite all of the glaring evidence to the contrary easily discoverable on the internet with regards to this child's case. I had to post a response, especially as more may come to light about this case as a man in South Carolina fights to clear the child's name if only to bring to light our country's history of allowing the state to put children as young as 10 and 12 into electric chairs and hangman's nooses.
His entire blog post was filled to overflowing with ambiguous, ahistorical, and terrifyingly bad assessments of both the child's guilt and the course of events surrounding his ultimate execution. But it was his closing with the below statement that forced me to post some sort of response:
"However, nothing illegal was done during the investigation and prosecution of the case. All the procedures utilized by the police, courts, prosecution and prison system conform to the existing standards and legal requirements of the time and place."
And this was my response, we'll see if he allows it to show up on his blog:
What is at stake for you in making this ludicrous and patently false claim with regards to this child murdered by his own government? Why the insistence on his guilt and the right behavior of those who conspired to kill the boy?
To interrogate a child who just happened to be seen somewhere near where two girls were killed without anyone else there should horrify you! How difficult would it have been to intimidate a 14 year old boy in a time where even he knew that his life was worth less than nothing to those harassing him into confession? I saw a freakin' DiscoveryID show a few months ago where a fine upstanding White man from the midwest confessed to killing his own child when the cops interrogated him for 20hours - then a lawyer, DNA evidence, and his wife's support proved him completely innocent! The look in his eyes as he explained what it was like in that tiny room with those cops will haunt me forever. And that was a White man in 2000s America! This was a Black child in 1940's America.
What is your motive here? Because instead of honesty, compassion, and reality (because for some reason you need to believe race played no role and this child was not assassinated) this story compels you to defend a system which has many, many instances in even our current day and age of people (of all races!) railroaded by police and imprisoned or put to death when they were really innocent. This country has often made victims of innocents due to a system where, once the police decide you are guilty, you can forget any chance of reprieve unless you have the money to buy proper evidentiary procedure.
As a teacher, as a woman, as a human being, I am unable to adequately express my distress, sadness, and terror at the thought that after casually googling this poor child's name, I come across a blog that holds our history and this child's life so cheaply as to proclaim what happened to him just.
The Only appropriate, sustainable Path our country can take is to Own and Accept our history in all of its horror and ugliness and use it as a guide to avoid replicating the same mistakes and abuses of the gift of life and location. This begins with avoiding the desire to make history nice and ignore the incomprehensibly terrifying fact that seemingly nice people killed a child because they could not look at him and see a child and a human, but only their own fear, prejudice and hatred.
Please, henceforth if you discuss this type of situation as "fair," and make pleas on behalf of the "differing social mores" of our past, remember that those "different" mores do not make the actions produced any less worthy of condemnation! Injustice of this kind, just because it's in a "different time" is no less deserving of the full extent our of horrified disavowal of this thinking. Human life should never be so casually written off that this is called fair or acceptable.
