ISOLATED KILLINGS OF BLACK MEN

Isolated killings of black men. however tragic, senseless and gruesome they may be, are more for psychological affect than for material effect, on the corpus of remaining black people. They connote more than they denote. They inflame and terrorize, and actually stimulate more resistance than ever due to their savagery! These thoughts occur to me, as I read about the fate of captured or surrendering black troops in the "On to Richmond," chapter in LIKE MEN OF WAR: BLACK TROOPS IN THE CIVIL WAR 1862-1865, by Noah Andre Trudeau (1999); well-remembering that black troops were the critical factor, the "sable arm," that actually won the war for the North, because it was literally "liberty or death" for them! Trudeau writes: "Tragically, the fate of black soldiers captured in this campaign differed little from that suffered by their comrades in the West. Charles Hopkins, a white New Jersey soldier captured during the Wilderness fighting, was marched along with other captives to the Orange Court House and placed in the basement of a building that was being used as a holding pen. On the morning of May 9, the POWs were aroused with a cry, "Hey thar you-uns, if you want to see a nigger hang look 'round right smart." Hopkins and his companions scrambled to the window of their cell, "and sure enough they were just pulling up one of Burnside's black heroes in full uniform, the New Jerseyman recalled... An even more chilling incident was related in the matter-of-fact entry for May 8 in the diary of a Virginia cavalry man named Byrd C. Willis: "We captured three negro soldiers the first we had seen. They were taken out on side of the road and shot, & their bodies were left there." P.214 This reminded me of the fate of Michael Brown of Ferguson and of Eric Garner of a Staten Island, in the ongoing struggle for African American freedom.