EDITORIAL (Continued from page 5) discuss it, to not help them process it, is simply not an option. At least not a good one. Minnesota is only 8% black (Minneapolis 16.8%) and they still wound up with a race problem of a national caliber. Because it doesn’t take a lot of people of a different color to expose dangerous, dormant, and sometimes probably subconscious racial attitudes in a community. Typically, it only takes one. And we all know too many of their names: Trayvon Martin. Freddie Gray. Emmett Till. Breonna Taylor. Ahmaud Arbery. Eric Garner. And now George Floyd. As remote as Montecito may be from Minneapolis... and Baltimore... and Atlanta, how do we explain this story... to our kids? To ourselves? To each other? Because to not take a position “Leading scientists, sociologists and psychoanaon it is tantamount to taking the same lysts have come to realize that one generation’s position as Chauvin’s colleague and traumatic experiences are often transmitted to the next generation, and even generations after lookout, Officer Tou Thou. that.” – Leslie Gilbert-Lurie, book’s author I’ve heard a lot of news outlets say the George Floyd incident was a new sort of occurrence for otherwise pastoral Minnesota, but I did a little digging and actually, it’s not. Two hours from Minneapolis by car, a young boy was living in Duluth. That boy, Abram, wound up in Duluth because his relatives, Anna and Zig Zimmerman, had fled anti-Jewish pogroms in Odessa, Russia.
As the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, I can attest that traumas get passed down from one generation to the next.
Abram wound up living two blocks from a very notable Minnesota lynching. (Where three posthumously innocent victims were hung from a lamp pole in a melee witnessed by thousands.) Indeed, proximity to Duluth’s lynchings of Elias Clayton, Elmer Jackson, and Isaac McGhie had a huge impact on young Abram. As the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, I can attest that traumas get passed down from one generation to the next. In fact my sister, along with my mother, wrote a book about this very phenomenon called Bending Towards the Sun about my mom’s years hiding from the Nazis in an attic – as well as the trauma our Mom passed down to us, “the gift that keeps on giving.” In a similar manner, the lynching witnessed by Abram in Duluth was so seared into his memory that, years later, when Abram had a son, Shabtai Zisel ben Avraham, Shabtai, emerging from the University of Minnesota, wrote a song about the incident called “Desolation Row.” At this point he officially went not by Shabtai, the name under which he was Bar-mitzvad, but Robert Allen Zimmerman.
A beautiful shrine that shouldn’t have had to exist (photo by @munshots)
appropriately enough, Postcards of the Hanging. There’s also a memorial to the 1920 Minnesota lynchings at 1st Street and 2nd Avenue in Duluth. We all know memorials and statues can be controversial. Because they say a lot about our history and which history will be told. Which history will be literally memorial-ized. Personally, I think memorials such as the one at Duluth Plaza are important even when they make us uncomfortable, maybe especially when they do, because they can start important conversations. Between friends. Between races. Between parents and their kids. (The kind I feel so strongly must be had now with our children.) Because here’s what happens when those tough conversations don’t happen, like the one between Bob Dylan and his dad, or the tough Holocaust conversations between my mother and myself: 95 years after the historical event that sparked Dylan to write “Desolation Row,” also in June but this time in 2015, another Dylann, this one in South Carolina, named Dylann Roof with 2 “Ns,” watches news coverage of another Zimmerman, but this Zimmerman, named George, is the shooter of Trayvon Martin not at Twin Cities, but at the Retreat at Twin Lakes in Sanford, Florida. Roof is impacted by the Trayvon Martin incident and also impacted by footage of the police killing of Freddie Gray (in Baltimore). But no one processes the information with Roof. He kind of fits the “loner” profile and is not close with any parent, stepparent, or any other sort of influential relative, or any sort of responsible adult. According to the FBI, Dylann Roof “self-radicalizes” as he processes the same sort of information my kids and your kids just saw emanate from Minneapolis, but with no guidance, no discussion, and no mentorship.
We all have to deal with these incidents and images that are becoming a common ingredient in our kids’ internet feeds, even if they come from 2,011 miles away. Because to witness the video of a death in progress embalms it in our hearts and minds for all time. As the saying goes, once you see it, you can’t “unsee” it.
“Desolation Row” begins like this: They’re selling postcards of the hanging, they’re painting the passports brown The beauty parlor is filled with sailors, the circus is in town Here comes the blind commissioner, they’ve got him in a trance One hand is tied to the tight-rope walker, the other is in his pants And the riot squad they’re restless, they need somewhere to go As Lady and I look out tonight, from Desolation Row Shabtai, now Robert Zimmerman, subsequently changed his name, this time to Bob Dylan, reportedly after the Welsh rock star poet, Dylan Thomas. Interestingly, “Desolation Row” (1965) wasn’t Dylan’s first song about a lynching. That came in 1962 with his song “The Death of Emmett Till.” The incident that sparked “Desolation Row” occurred almost 100 years ago to this very day in Minnesota, in June of 1920. There have been at least two books about it. And one famous song by Dylan (later recorded again by My Chemical Romance) and previously covered by the Grateful Dead on their album called,
36 MONTECITO JOURNAL
Left to his own devices, and those devices include a Glock .45 caliber Gen4 pistol as well as, Dylann hopes, a semi-automatic AR-15 rifle which he tries to procure, Mr. Roof’s take-away from watching the George Zimmerman case and the Freddie Gray case is he would “like to start a race war in the U.S.A.” And he does his best to achieve precisely that by shooting up a bible study group in a church in Charleston, South Carolina – killing nine parishioners. Going back to the Duluth lynchings that occurred almost 100 years ago to this day, seven African American circus workers had been rounded up on spurious charges of rape, later proven false, in an incident incredibly similar to Amy Cooper vs. Christian Cooper a few days ago in New York’s Central Park. But without the incontrovertible alibi of a cell phone recorded video. 2,011 miles away from Minneapolis, Santa Barbara does not have a clean slate when it comes to racial justice. One not-so-well-known example happened in 1983 when the Harlem Globetrotters were visiting for a perfor-
“Justice is truth in action.” – Benjamin Disraeli
4 – 11 June 2020
