APRIL 27, 2021 – Hardly a day goes by, it seems, when we’re not confronted by some confounding denial of truth—that you-know-who, for example, lost his bid for re-election as president; or the January 6 attack on the capitol was led by anti-you-know-who forces to discredit you-know-who. Within that explanation you realize it carries a ray of hope. At least the deniers acknowledge that the attack occurred.
If denialism-in-the-face-of-reality is amplified by today’s communication technologies, it’s nothing new. Since the first moonrise, plenty of folks have insisted it’s a chunk of Münster.
Take for example, the case of Hartman Turnbow. In 1963—nearly 100 years after passage of the Fifteenth Amendment—Turnbow was the first Black person in 20th century Holmes County, Mississippi to try to register to vote. His attempted registration was part of an effort by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (“SNCC”) to register Black voters. The only catch was that at that time and place, if you were Black and tried to register, someone might try to blow up your house—along with you and your family.
Try, a couple of hateful whites did. They tossed one, then two firebombs into the Turnbow house while everyone inside was asleep. As Turnbow attempted to douse the flames, he yelled to his wife and daughter to flee. They shouted back, “We can’t! There’re two white guys with guns outside!” It turned out that Turnbow kept his own arsenal of firearms—it being America the free. With gunfire he chased the two enforcers of Black voter suppression clear off the Turnbow farm.
The next day, Bob Moses, the quiet, unflappable leader of the SNCC registration effort in Mississippi, along with an FBI agent sent by John Doar—one of the heroes of the Kennedy DOJ—appeared to gather evidence of the attack so the perpetrators could be apprehended and prosecuted.
This put the local sheriff in a bind. If he took up the case, by the next election, if not sooner, he’d no longer be sheriff. If he didn’t pursue the case, he’d trigger intervention by hated “big gov’mnt” in Washington. What to do? Arrest, charge, and prosecute . . . the victim. Turn Turnbow into the bad guy. Accuse him of firebombing his own house and firing multiple slugs into the clapboard exterior—thus creating sympathy for the SNCC registration effort. Create a conspiracy theory that accuses Moses and other SNCC volunteers of arson, as well. Try them in front of an all-white jury and . . . voila: sheriff’s dilemma solved.
You might say, “little has changed,” except the fibs and fakes and frauds have gotten bigly enormous. No longer confined to backwaters of the South, they’ve become standard fare for the majority of the party of . . . Lincoln.
You or I would not, could not eat green eggs and ham—in a house with a mouse or in a box with a fox, we could not eat them, Sam-I-am. But there will always be people who would eat them here . . .
eat them there,
eat them anywhere.
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© 2021 by Eric Nilsson
