Advent 2024: The Lynching of Robert Mosley

(Image of Robert Mosley painted with red clay from the soil of Madison County, Alabama, United States)

Advent Day Nine, December 9, 2024

This past Saturday, I attended a sobering and unusual event: the dedication of the first memorial marker for the ten lynching victims in my home county alone, the last lynching in my state in 1981. The long work of the Madison County Remembrance Project Team, the occasion drew dozens of people, black and white, gathered near the spot of the hanging of 16-year-old Robert Mosley in 1890. He’d been working as a farmhand when a white woman related to the farm owner accused Mosley of “sexual impropriety” (think To Kill A Mockingbird). Without a trial, without a lawyer, without witnesses, without even a chance to defend himself, when word got out, Mosely was tracked down, shot and injured, and then dragged to a spot of red clay where he, a lone, scared teenage boy, was strung from a tree while 450 white men looked on.  Afterwards, the white press praised the mob and the woman. No one was ever held accountable for Mosley’s death.

(Soil collected from the site of the lynching to be included in the lynching collection at The Legacy Museum, Montgomery, Alabama)

I’ve never mentioned in any of my blogs where I live because of my state’s racial history, injustices, fixation on the Confederacy and continuing racial (and other) biases. For all the natural beauty of Alabama, from its northern Appalachian foothills to its southern pristine white beaches, for all its good, caring, and moral citizens, it holds fast to its stain of violence and intolerance. I live in the more politically moderate northern part of the state, in a city known for education, space industry, brew pubs, and high tech developments.  But even here, the stain endures.

What does this history of lynching have to do with Advent?  Everything.  It speaks to waiting (134 years to acknowledge Robert Mosley; seven years of planning for the marker to become a reality), waiting for justice, equality, witness, waiting for remorse, repentance, awareness, and awakening. It speaks to waiting for the Light to shine on all the tragedies of histories everywhere, to wanting that light to shine, on all the shameful deeds humans do to one another. It speaks to being bold enough and brave enough to level the high mountains, lift the low valleys, and prepare a new way, to the time when humanity will embrace the Light, wake up as one, and say “No more.”

(Dedicated in Madison County, Alabama, December 7, 2024)

No more lynching, literal and metaphorical, of those who seem different from us, of those we count less than us, of those we’d rather keep down, of those we fear will want what is ours.

On the way home, we pass a pick-up truck. “Don’t Tread on Me” warns its yellow snake-imprinted flag. The road ahead is still long and arduous, but Advent hope proclaims that “We shall overcome, one day.”  May it be so.

Blessings ~ Rosemary