Regarding Black Heroes

It was 123 years ago today that Frazier Baker, a 40-year-old schoolteacher and postmaster of Lake City, South Carolina, and the youngest of his six children were lynched. The alleged crime? Doing his federal job. In 1897, Baker had become the first African-American to serve as postmaster of the Lake City Post Office. And for refusing to give up that post, he and his entire family were attacked in their home.

Baker was one of hundreds of Blacks appointed to postmasterships across the South by the new McKinley administration after the election of 1896. The local White community tried to force Baker from his position. When that failed, a mob came at night to set fire to his family's home, which also served as the local post office. Baker and his wife were at home with their children. When the mob started firing at the trapped family, little Julia, just two, was shot and killed. Trying to save his family from the flames, Baker opened the front door to lead them out. He was immediately shot dead. Lavinia Baker and three of her other children were wounded in the vicious attack, but they and the remaining children managed to escape. 

Today the Lake City Post Office bears Frazier Baker's name. But that recognition and reparation was over 120 years in coming. 

In April 1899, thirteen men were brought to trial in federal court on charges of murder, conspiracy to commit murder, assault, and destruction of mail after two members of the Baker lynch mob agreed to testify for the prosecution. A jury of ten White men deliberated for 24 hours before reporting that they were deadlocked at five to five. The judge declared a mistrial, and the case was not retried. 

Lavinia Baker and her surviving children were left to bear the pain and trauma of their hellish experience. Their story, and the courage of Frazier Baker, became but a footnote in Black history. Congressman and House Majority Whip James Clyburn sponsored the 2018 bill to rename the post office in honor of Frazier Baker's sacrifice. Yet while he grew up not far from Lake City, the story was not one he heard. 

A little over a year before Baker's brutal death, another Black family had been attacked in their home in southern Kentucky. At about 11 p.m. on January 21, 1897, George Dinning, his wife Mary, and their six children were asleep in their beds when 25 armed White men on horseback surrounded their home. Falsely accusing Dinning, a formerly enslaved man, of stealing turkeys and chickens, they began firing into the house. Dinning was hit in the arm. Bleeding from his injury, he grabbed his shotgun, opened a window, and fired back, killing a man named Jodie Conn. The mob retrieved Conn's body and fired again, wounding Dinning in the forehead.

Dinning turned himself in to the county sheriff the next day. The assailants returned that night to threaten Mary, who took her children and escaped from the home. The next night, it burned to the ground. 

Dinning was convicted of manslaughter by an all-White jury and sentenced to seven years in prison. His attackers were never arrested. That might have been the end of the story. But after he received a number of petitions to pardon Dinning -- including from prominent Whites -- , in July 1897 the governor granted a pardon.

Still the story continued.

Dinning and his family moved to Indiana, where, in an act almost unheard of for Blacks, he sued his White attackers in federal court. Even more remarkably, he won his case. While  Dinning became the first Black man in the country to win a judgment against a White man after a wrongful manslaughter conviction, though, he would only recover a small portion of the $50,000 in damages awarded to him. His family never returned to their 124 acre farm, which eventually fell into the hands of White neighbors. Justice was not served.

On December 1, 1955, seamstress and activist Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a city bus to a White passenger, and was arrested and taken to jail. The Montgomery bus boycott followed, and on June 5, 1956, a federal district court ruled in Browder v. Gayle that bus segregation was unconstitutional, a decision that the United States Supreme Court upheld in November 1956.

Rosa Parks became a civil rights icon, and rightly so. But her resistance is only part of the story. She was not the only Black woman who refused to give up her seat on the bus, nor was she the first to be arrested for doing so. Nearly 10 months earlier, in March 1955, a15-year-old high school student, Claudette Colvin, was jailed for her defiant refusal to relinquish her seat on a Montgomery bus to a White person. It was Claudette Colvin, not Rosa Parks, and four other women who were the plaintiffs in Browder v. Gayle.

Frazier Baker and George Dinning and their families and Claudette Colvin and her co-plaintiffs are just a few of the many, many heroes whose stories are told during Black History Month. But their stories are not just Black history; they are vital American history. We need to hear, tell, and teach these stories always, and not just during Black History Month. We need to be diligent in seeking out stories of our past not only to honor our heroes, but finally to be able to acknowledge truth and move to a place of reparation. We can do this.

Love,

Nancie/Mom/Mimi/Grandma