COMMENTARY
Klan killings just one of many race crimes

By Rochelle Riley

We step gingerly around them on the battlefield of life. But the land mines that are issues of race in this country remain in place, sometimes below the surface, sometimes poking up just enough for us to avoid them. Every now and again, we step on one and it blows up, the explosion causing us to pay attention to the fact that we have never tried getting rid of the mines.

Recent attempts to mend fences built by slavery reads like a roll call of victims: the conviction of Klan member Edgar Killen 41 years to the day after he helped kill three civil rights workers, apologies for lynching and for banks accepting slaves as collateral for loans in the 1800s.

Yet with all of the apologizing, we fail to recognize the larger problem — that the legacy of slavery still haunts this country, and until a single presidential administration or a single Congress has the courage to finally face that ghost head-on, we will never get over race — not in Washington, not in Detroit, not in America, not in the lifetimes of grandchildren yet unborn.

To hear bank presidents and senators speak eloquently about slavery's horror without acknowledging its damage is one of America's great ironies. So is it to hear a U.S. president condemn affirmative action, which for some companies and universities has been the only method of amends for centuries of injustice.

To hear praise heaped on Mississippi for finally prosecuting a murder when the state is just as guilty and when the charges waited until the killer was old and infirm — a hateful life lived without remorse — shows just how much America doesn't get it.

Rita Bender, widow of one of the slain three whose families finally saw justice last week, was right: If it had been only James Chaney who had been missing while out doing civil rights work, he would have been a silent ghost, claimed only by family crying his name. That he was joined by two white soldiers in his battle for freedom helped his family claim justice, too.

But what of Mississippi and the other unsung heroes and heroines whose lives were snatched by villains in hoods and ornaments, sinning in the name of God and the country they wished they had?

Who prosecutes the states that allowed the murders and the maimings and the daily horrors witnessed by children now grown into people who bear those scars in silence?

Who prosecutes America, which for a hundred years embraced an institution that made a mockery of its new Constitution? What can make the dialogue even possible?

How can an America that won't call its president to task for inventing war and costing thousands of lives and billions of dollars ever investigate the lingering harm done to blacks who were unwilling immigrants, and to the African countries that lost millions of their young sons and daughters?

Each moment of justice that is celebrated and touted as progress in America's racial healing is but a reminder that America cannot heal itself until it faces what it did, and that crime didn't start with the murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner in 1964.

It is a crime that took centuries to commit. It shouldn't take centuries to make it right.

Rochelle Riley is a columnist for the Detroit Free Press.