The Theory of the Shrunken Heart

THERE IS A short film embedded in the wall just to the left of the welcome desk in the lobby of the Equal Justice Initiative’s new Legacy Museum, which opened to the public on April 26. The first time I visited the museum, I stood in a crowd watching the video and tried to comprehend the story. An African-American girl clung to her father’s neck as he carried her, walking slowly toward white men standing in a field. The setting? The Antebellum South.

That film left me weeping—near wailing—right there in the lobby.

A few weeks later, I returned with participants on a weeklong pilgrimage through the history of the control of African bodies on U.S. soil. The journey—offered for continuing education and graduate credit through Greenville University—began in Montgomery, Ala., at the Legacy Museum. Each of the participants watched the video. One woman was so overwhelmed with grief that she had to leave the museum.

The Legacy Museum and the accompanying National Memorial for Peace and Justice shine light on details that have been hidden from us. They help us understand the humanity of the oppressed and the cruelty of slavery, Jim Crow, mass incarceration, and present-day police brutality.

At the museum I learned about an African-American teacher named Elizabeth Lawrence. She was walking home in Birmingham, Ala., on July 5, 1933, when white schoolchildren threw rocks at her. She reprimanded the children, as a teacher would. That night the children’s parents lynched her.

The pilgrimage participants and I walked through the labyrinth of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, overwhelmed by its 800 Corten steel monuments, each representing a county where a man, woman, or child was lynched in the United States. I remembered 14-year-old Emmett Till, who was snatched from his great-uncle’s home, tied up, and beaten. His murderers tied a 74-pound cotton-gin fan to his naked body with razor wire and tossed him into the Tallahatchie River. The memorial baptized the pilgrimage participants and me in stories of the killed.

THE NEXT DAY I interviewed Dr. Bob Zellner, veteran SNCC organizer of European descent. After the cursory get-to-know-you conversation, I asked the question: “What drove white people to fight to the death to maintain white supremacy?”

“I’ve developed a theory,” Zellner said. “It’s the theory of the shrunken heart. First, you have to understand slavery was an act of war that had to be carried out every day against black people.” He explained that people were captured in the context of war and sold as an act of war.

It all clicked: the torture instruments employed by slave owners and overseers, the sexual violence, the lynching, the drug war, the mass incarceration, Ferguson, Baltimore, the militarization of our border, the criminalization of immigration and refugee status. They were acts of war—acts of domination meant to maintain and protect a white nation.

“For centuries, through slavery and later through Jim Crow and the sharecropper economic system in the South, white Southerners had to constantly suppress their own feelings of sympathy and empathy for another human being,” Zellner explained. “In the same way they had to steel their feelings for that chicken or calf that was slaughtered on the farm so they could eat, they steeled their feelings for people of color.”

“For centuries,” Zellner concluded, “white people have shrunken their own hearts.”

Let’s just sit in that for a moment.