‘Love Black children like a revolt’: Dr. Stacey Patton wants America to see the ‘machinery’ behind the violence against Black children
TheGrio...
In her latest book, “Strung Up,” the award-winning journalist and historian confronts America’s dark history and its impacts on its children.
As an award-winning journalist, educator, and historian, Dr. Stacey Patton, who rose to prominence in the 2010s with sobering words speaking truth to power, is used to excavating the past to understand the present.
“When you’re a historian, you expect to look at something that happened in the past and be sort of reflective about it, and to draw lessons. It becomes a set of interesting facts. You can explain phenomena. You can explain change over time,” she told theGrio over Zoom on Friday.
“But to be writing history while you’re living in the echoes, there’s a whole different set of you know feelings that come with it,” the historian continued. “I spent many years writing about a history that many people want to be safely sealed in the past, and then this summer we were suddenly confronted again, and again, and again with Black people found [dead] under circumstances that generated fear and suspicion and just profound distrust.”
What has stood out to Patton the most about cases like Nolan Wells, an 18-year-old whose mysterious death in July has raised widespread suspicion, is that as a people, Black people, “know how often Black death has been explained away before Black families and communities felt their questions were taken seriously.”
“That is exactly why ‘Strung Up’, my book, is arriving at this moment. This book says, ‘Look, you cannot understand the terror of this present political moment if you’ve amputated the history that gives that terror some meaning,” the Howard University professor explained.
“Strung Up: How White America Learned to Lynch Black Children,” arriving on shelves Oct. 6, will bring that history to the forefront.
“The timing is horrifically on point,” the author said.
Black pain as spectacle
At a moment when mysterious Black deaths are once again raising old fears, concerns, and distrust, Patton’s deeply researched book reaches into one of the darkest chapters of American history to examine what we may have missed about its youngest victims and witnesses. Along the way, she unearths a disturbing history about Black childhood, white childhood, and racial terror that may help explain why the past doesn’t always feel like it stays there.
The scholar began to realize just how much had been missed while digging deep through archives, poring over photographs, newspaper reports, and other records. Once she began looking specifically for children, she started seeing them everywhere.
“I realized Black children were not incidental to this history. They were targets. They were the point,” she recalled.
Patton discovered Black children, of all ages, had been victims of lynchings and brutal deaths at the hands of white people as young as in utero. The next major discovery, she noted, “was even more disturbing.”
“White children were everywhere, too, at these events,” she recalled.
They were there because lynchings were often public spectacles. White people brought their entire families, including their children, to watch. Crowds sometimes numbered in the thousands. Spectators posed for photographs with victims, turned those photographs into postcards, and collected pieces of rope and even body parts as souvenirs. In one account, according to the National Museum of African American History and Culture, thousands of white women and children reportedly took pieces of the rope used in the 1931 lynching of Matthew Williams in Salisbury, Maryland, home as keepsakes.
“White children absorbed these spectacles as lessons of race and power and innocence, and who was entitled to violence,” the historian explained, adding how the discovery changed the question she was asking entirely.
“I stopped asking only why were Black children lynched, and started asking what had to happen culturally, psychologically, and generationally for white adults to look at a Black child and decide that child could be tortured, castrated, burned, dragged through the streets, and killed for enjoyment, for pleasure, for them to feel safe in their own bodies to make an argument about racial superiority, and then bring their own children to watch,” Patton continued.
Those children eventually grew up. They became adults, parents, judges, politicians, educators, law enforcement officers, doctors, lawyers, and other members of the communities and institutions shaping American life, and raised generations of their own. And, at the same time, mysterious Black deaths didn’t exactly stop.
Meanwhile, Black children grew up carrying the inherited understanding of what could happen to people who looked like them, hearing what had happened to relatives and neighbors, and passing those stories down in their own families. Sometimes, those children are the reason we know what happened at all.
Reckoning with history
In 1918, 10-year-old Rufus Morrison was hiding in a cornfield when he witnessed the lynching of Mary Turner, a Black woman who was eight months pregnant and had publicly denounced the lynching of her husband. Morrison witnessed the mob torture and kill Turner and her unborn child. He never forgot what he saw and eventually told his own family about it, including his daughter, preserving an account of one of the most gruesome lynchings in American history for another generation.
For Patton, reckoning with histories like these also means reckoning with what America had to believe about Black children to allow such violence in the first place. We often use “adultification” to describe Black children being perceived and treated as older than they actually are. What the historian found in the archives severely complicates this.
“It suggests that Black children are harmed because white people mistakenly perceive them as older than they are, as if this is fundamentally an error of perception,” she explained, adding, “When I went into the archive, I found something much more disturbing. White people always knew perfectly well that they were looking at children when they were destroying them.”
She said the “most urgent thing” she hopes readers of “Strung Up” take away is how “Black children were not accidentally swept up in racial violence. Black children weren’t experiencing, you know, a junior version of what happened to their elders—their childhood was deliberately denied to them.”
“Before you can torture a child, before you can lynch a child, mutilate a child, you first have to convince yourself that you are not looking at a child at all, and that’s the machinery that I want people to see,” the child advocate added.
It’s a machinery Patton believes we can still recognize today, including when Black children are treated as threats by police or vigilantes.
“What does it say about a society when it has to try to erase the childhood of Black children in order to justify what it does to them?” she wondered aloud, before adding, “I want people to see the machinery. I want them to see that lynching is not just something that happens at a tree, but it happens in policy. It happens in the medical space. It happens in educational spaces, in juvenile justice, in parenting practices as well.”
Looking at such a brutal history this closely isn’t an easy or simple task, whether you’re the one spending years researching it or the one being asked to read it.
“I had to take care of myself spiritually, intellectually, emotionally,” Patton expressed.
She admitted, “I had to build a very deliberate practice around surviving the material, because you can’t spend years reading about children being tortured and mutilated and burned and shot and displayed and pretend that it’s it just stays on the page because it doesn’t.”
The hardest part for her was knowing that no matter how much she uncovered, she couldn’t actually change what happened to any of the children. She could recover names, tell stories, and put history back where it belonged, but there was no undoing any of it.
“I can tell you these stories, I could write with surgical precision. I could make a sophisticated argument to give an explanation for this, but I can’t bring them back,” Patton noted.
That weight is also why Patton was careful about how she brought readers into the book. Rather than simply dropping them into what she describes as a “chamber of horrors,” she imagined herself taking them by the hand and walking through it with them.
“I had to walk through it as a historian to look at things, and I had to write this in a way where I had to imagine myself taking the. the reader’s hand, say, ‘Come, go with me. We’re gonna see some horrible stuff. We’re gonna look here, there, and over there. I’m gonna show you archival material. I’m gonna ask you questions about it. We’re gonna have a conversation, and I will keep you safe,” Patton explained.
Don’t get her wrong, though. “Strung Up,” she ensured, is not “racial trauma porn.”
“This is not another book that is designed to make Black people feel awful and to traumatize Black folks. There are some hard moments we have to face in this book, but this book really puts the white family, white culture, white psychology, white brains and nervous systems, white bodies, white ideas under the microscope,” the author said, adding, “You’re gonna arrive at the end of this chamber of horrors, changed, and looking at our children in a different way, and resolved to love our children like a revolt.”
In other words, yes, this history is hard. Patton had to learn how to step away, close the archives, and refill her own cup while writing it. Readers may have to do some of the same. However, the point isn’t to look away forever. If anything, the scholar hopes doing the difficult work of looking back can change how we show up for Black children right now.
“I don’t want people to finish strung up, feel horrified for a few days, and then put the book on the shelf,” Patton urged.
“My call to action is very simple,” the child advocate explained. “Love Black children like a revolt. Love Black children like their lives depend on it because they do.”