The Mighty Anchor

North Forest Today May 10, 2018 Page 4
“She was not a suspect in Norman’s murder, but she was supposed to be a star witness. She refused, she refused, so she was a martyr.”
Ms. Branan also learned of a surprising racial back story. Mr. Moore, the youngest of the victims, was a distant cousin of hers because
one of her white ancestors had children with a black woman. Her white family members knew they were killing a black family member.
“What I discovered was that the racially mixed Moore family was very much involved with the so-called white Moore family up to the time
of this lynching. This lynching was, in and of itself, a message lynching to say to black and white people: ‘Segregate. We are changing,
the South is changing. You must separate now.’ It was a very violent laying down of a line in the sand to keep us apart from one another.”
Ms. Irvine said she was eager to meet Ms. Branan. With the South’s widespread, insidious history of racial hatred, Ms. Irvine could not
hold anything against Ms. Branan.
“I wasn’t angry about it. These things happened. I was very grateful that Karen had given me a gift. She had given me a gift of connecting
me to some of my ancestors that I didn’t know much about. I’m angry about racism. I’m angry about racial terror. I didn’t personalize it in
terms of Karen being a descendant of the slave owners because, otherwise, I’d be a very mad sister.”
Together, the two women visited the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, a new memorial in Montgomery, Ala., honoring lynching
victims.
Ms. Branan said that the story of the lynching her family was involved in, along with others, was not just a historical tale.
“The past has not passed. It’s still with us. It’s with us in different forms. Some of those forms are even more pernicious than the old forms.
We are living in the past because we have not addressed the past. We have not atoned for the past. We have not even educated ourselves
about the past.”
“Black lives didn’t matter then in 1912 when they lynched my cousin John Moore. Twenty-one-year-old black men in America, now they’ve
been lynched in another kind of way. Even if you didn’t own slaves, even if your family never attended a lynching or watched it or whatever,
white people have benefited politically, socially and economically from a system of slavery and oppression from Mississippi to Maine. It’s
not to make white people feel guilty, but it’s to accept the privilege that’s been awarded through a system of oppression.”
By: John Eligon, New York Times