Is It Time for a Day of National Grieving?

The coronavirus had already saddened me. I was beginning to wonder if I wasn’t in a state of downright depression.  This pandemic was not only killing people, but it was putting many people who live paycheck to paycheck in a very precarious position.  Our country was in a crisis, and there was no sign of its letting up anytime soon.  I thought often of all the people in our country who were suffering.  Small business owners were struggling to survive.  Many people couldn’t pay their rents.  I couldn’t exactly say I was grieving for them—as grieving usually implies a death that can set off this reaction—but my heart certainly went out to them.  It didn’t seem as if things could get any worse in our country.  But they did.

The brutal treatment of George Floyd by police officers in Minneapolis, which resulted in his death, however, definitely gave us something to grieve over.  On Wednesday, June 3, shortly after this killing of an African-American man, our local public broadcasting station, KPBS, aired Reconstruction: America after the Civil War, the documentary by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.  The television program could not have come at a better time, for it showed not just the great hopes of black people after the Civil War, but the massacres and lynchings that followed shortly thereafter.  It took 100 years for civil rights laws to be enacted and enforced in this country after Reconstruction.  Meanwhile, the killing went on and on.  And it’s still going on.  That was the sad, bitter truth of the documentary, and it was poignantly brought home to me by the killing of George Floyd.   I couldn’t help thinking of the thousands of black people whom we have wrongly killed in this country.  The NAACP website states that between 1882 and 1968 there were 4,743 lynchings in the United States, of which 3,446 were blacks.  This figure does not include the many massacres that occurred during Reconstruction and afterwards up until 1968.  Nor does it include the number of blacks who have died at the hands of policemen.  In George Floyd’s death, I grieve for all of these fellow human beings who have gone much too early to their graves.  

Is it time for a Day of National Grieving for African Americans, to be observed annually?  I definitely think so.  This could be a moment of truth and reconciliation in the spirit of the commissions with this aim we have seen elsewhere around the world to heal the open wounds in a society.  We need to begin righting the wrongs we have done: the enslavement of Africans, the persecution of them and their descendants on our soil (the recent book The Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd is particularly moving on this subject), and their dying at our hands.    It is time for us to grieve together as a nation for the lives we have robbed.  I’ve been particularly touched to see policemen kneeling with protesters lately.  In so doing and in engaging in other acts of reconciliation, maybe we can recognize a fundamental truth:  namely, that we are all human beings with feelings and that we need to take care of one another.  It is time for our country to move in a very different direction and to come together around a basic understanding of our humanity.   Let’s start the healing as soon as possible and unify our wounded country.