Black deaths by hanging Matter

City Hall of Victorville, pop. 122,312 in 2018

Say their names: 

Robert Fuller died last Wednesday, June 10.  Age 24.  Palmdale.   Another article appeared in yesterday's  LA Times, June 14.

Malcolm Harsch died on May 31, two weeks ago.  Age 38.  Victorville.  See this article, also in the LA Times.

These men are too young to die.  Why are they gone?  

As I weed my garden and cook dinner, I can't erase from my mind the dark image of a man hanging so close to my home.  Not in Minneapolis or Louisville or Ferguson.  Not in the Deep South one hundred years ago.  I feel depressed.  I listen to their families on the radio or the television, and occasionally I choke up along with those speaking.

Robert's death was initially attributed to suicide. 

Unnoticed in life, both men earned an article in the New York Times in death.

Both died in public places, not at home or in a hospital.

“Why was it right here in public, in front of City Hall, next to a church, in front of a library?” one woman said [about Robert]. “Why was it like that? Who would do that? No black man would hang himself in public like that.”

Robert had participated in a Black Lives Matter protest a few days earlier.

Malcolm died next to a public library and also near a homeless encampment.  

In recent photos, both men look young, innocent, and handsome, yet they faced systemic racism.  They died during days of enflamed national agony and protest over the videotaped lynching of George Floyd on May 25.

Did Robert choose a simulated lynching at City Hall as a form of protest?  Or was he lynched?  

If he was lynched by hanging from a tree an hour from my home, I am horrified.

If he was jobless and hopeless as he coped with systemic racism and pandemic illness, I am still horrified.  I grieve for this young man and for his family.

Did Malcolm hang himself from a tree, as my great-uncle did in 1933?   Immigrant Laurie Pohja was ashamed of not being able to support his wife and two sons after the foundry closed, where he had designed molds to make iron parts needed in the mining towns of Colorado. 

Or did someone lynch Malcolm?  In Victorville, an hour and a half from beautiful Santa Monica, where I live.

Palmdale, pop. 156,667 in 2018

Both Palmdale and Victorville are high-desert, low-income communities where Joshua trees grew before the population of Los Angeles crept up to the mountain passes around the city and spilled over onto adjacent plateaus.  

Palmdale has  about 157,000 people and an altitude of 2,657 ft.; Victorville is the same altitude but has attracted only 122,312 souls.  Minus one.

Many who live there commute into LA or the "Inland Empire" for work in things like construction or plumbing.  Joe Spencer, who fixes my electrical problems, lives in Palmdale.  People who can afford Beverly Hills or Santa Monica don't live there or in Victorville.  We just drive out there once a year to see the orange hillsides of California poppies.

Joe's a liberal guy, a chatty Democrat, but many of his white neighbors are racist.  Was someone who saw the protest irritated enough to follow Robert home?  White lives matter, too!  

Or did Robert owe someone money?  My mind keeps ruminating on the circumstances that could cause this odd tragedy.  

We're used to deaths by gun, and I have a friend whose sister, a pregnant teen, hung herself in her closet in Santa Monica twenty years ago.  But not from a tree at City Hall.

Although suicide is the tenth leading cause of death in the US, it's the third leading cause for black males of ages 15-24.  These deaths matter.

I'm haunted and depressed by these recent, close-to-home hangings because I live on the privileged end of the continuum that causes early death for too many who are poor and black.  With privilege comes guilt unless I work for justice.  

"No man is an island, entire of itself," said John Donne. the poet and preacher who wrote Devotions upon Emergent Occasions. "Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind."

We have all now arrived at an emergent occasion.  The deaths of Robert and Malcolm, as well as that of George Floyd, are at least partially caused by systemic racism and economic inequality.  I participate in that system and that economy.  I haven't done much of anything to change it.

I'm involved in humankind, and I need to get more involved.  My food and clothing, computers and comforts are produced by others but not equally shared with them.  I need to open my eyes to their pain and work for change.