From a Paducah lynching to the president: How can we reconcile our history today?
My grandmother wrote a book about the road on which our family has lived for five generations. Her book is filled with stories about our beloved Pool Road in Paducah. It’s the road on which my great-great grandfather, formerly enslaved, passed as a white man to purchase 89 acres of land. It’s the road on which my great-grandparents reared nine children. It’s the road on which my mother spent much of her youth. And it’s the road on which I learned to ride my first red Schwinn bicycle. When I think of the Pool Road of my childhood, the smell of honeysuckles is immediate.
I desperately want to write about the smell of honeysuckles and the adventures of growing up on Pool Road. Unfortunately, my mind will not stay there. The 45th President of the United States evoked the language of lynching and since then, my mind shifted to focus on a particular story my grandmother recounted in her book. I am haunted by the fact I grew up about a mile from the site where two black men were actually “jerked into eternity” on Oct. 13, 1916. In Paducah, I grew up near the site where Brack Kinley and Luther Durrett drew their last breaths in front of a jeering mob of white women, their children, Klansmen, and frightened black onlookers forced to watch. I played underneath the “hanging tree” where their blood spilled from gunshot wounds after they were hanged. I can still feel the cool grass under my bare feet as I ran about, likely, in the spot where the coroner retrieved what remained of their charred bones as he sifted through ashes from their burned bodies.
My grandmother writes there are two stories about how Pool Road got its name. One is it was named for a Kentucky pioneer bearing the surname Poole. The other says there was so much violence on and near the road, that it was common to see pools of blood on its surface. I am not sure which of these stories is based in fact. But, the reality that both of these stories exist and are believable sends a chill down my spine. The stories of so-called pioneers and bloodshed often go hand in hand. The question that comes to my mind and my heart is how do I, how do we, live with such realities?
To say the United States has done a poor job of reconciling the truth of its history is an understatement. What one group of people calls heritage and pride, another group identifies as continued hatred and subjugation. One group laments the loss of “the good ole days” while another group questions when the days were good.
Brack Kinley was lynched because of an accusation, not a conviction. Luther Durrett was lynched because he protested the lawless execution. In the end a “double inquest” was held at the site by the coroner. A jury was then called. The jury delivered the following verdict: “Both men died by hanging and burning by unknown hands.” By Oct. 16, 1916 the case was considered closed. And for decades after, black men and women continued to be murdered all across the country, in the same heinous manner, under the same unjust circumstances. It would be 52 years after their deaths and 4 years before I was born that the federal government would finally outlaw such barbaric behavior.
My grandmother writes that as time passed, the story about the lynching of Kinley and Durrett faded away. By the time my generation began to inhabit Pool Road, there wasn’t even a whisper of it. But just over 103 years later, my heart goes out to the families of Mr. Brack Kinley and Mr. Luther Durrett. My heart goes out to the child in me whose bare feet unknowingly ran about such sacred ground. Most deeply, my heart mourns for a nation that continues to destructively cling to its whitewashed history of the “pioneering spirit”, in spite of all the pools of blood so easily traced with every pioneering step.
Western Kentucky native LeTonia Jones is a social justice entrepreneur and writer in search of deeper truths about love and what is required to live fully human and be at peace.