THE NOOSE NEVER CAME BEFORE THE LYNCH MOB: Confronting Historic Symbols of Hatred and Injustice Shouldn't Start with Censorship

"Free speech is not to be regulated like diseased cattle and impure butter."

- William O. "Wild Bill" Douglas,
U.S. Supreme Court Justice & American Badass,
Record-holder for Most Impeachment Attempts

OXFORD, Ohio (ZP) -- I remember sitting in Dr. M's office, back in 2001, arguing over a grade I'd received on a quiz in his dreaded media law class. More appropriately, I remember sitting in Dr. M's office, losing an argument over a grade.

At one of toughest universities in North America, M. was, by far, the hardest instructor in the College of Liberal Arts. And the old bastard had friggin' failed me - I supposedly earned that whopping 30 percent, having aced the multiple-choice section.

He'd given me zero points on short essay questions that, I felt, were passionate defenses of the evils of government suppression of free expression. But his blood-red comments were sharper than razorblades, slashed right through my reasoning with simple NO!s in the margins of my blue book, the words SEE ME scribbled on the last page like an epitaph.

In his office that day, I argued and raged and vented; Dr. M. simply nodded and listened. When I finished my diatribe about democracy and hate speech and what should and shouldn't be protected under the First Amendment, the old prof leaned forward and put a bony Minnesota finger in my face.

He'd given me zero points on my short essays, he explained, because I rode the fence in my arguments against censorship, picked out which parts of cases like Brandenburg v. Ohio, R.A.V. v. The City of St. Paul, and Yates v. United States that I personally agreed with and disregarded what I found objectionable. He accused me of censoring the course materials to fit my worldview.

To understand the fluidity of things like the First Amendment and its freedoms, I'd have to learn to stand up and walk on that fence. If I wanted to pass his class, too, I'd have to be willing to see beyond what I wanted to see, to give up on the herd mentality that allows most folks to simply draw from two pastures when an answer is needed for comfort.

To embrace the wholeness of the Rule of Law, the organic, fluid body of jurisprudence that encompasses certain unalienable human rights, one must learn to walk atop barbed wire to bear witness to a holistic justice, free of personal bias or politics of the moment, with those beliefs serving as not a legal compass but as insight into the motives behind things like censorship.

M. took the crumpled Blue Book from my fist, tacked an extra 15 percentage points onto that grade. Even if I'd made the mistake of riding a fence that should've been beneath my feet, the just teacher heard out his lost student's reasoning before he passed final judgment.

A whopping 45 percent. The hardest failing grade I ever truly earned.

From that point on, I've tried to avoid riding the fence. Sitting on a post and waiting for mob-rule opinion to determine freedom's boundaries, I've learned, only opens the gates toward dictatorship and oppression.

To walk the fence in a democratic society, one where the free flow of ideas and art and writing is cherished, is to stand above the mob rules of political and popular correctness, to be willing to scream Freedom! without ever looking down into the fields for support.

Cowards and madmen can keep the fence posts warm, have their legs tugged at by those seeking an ally in their moral and political arguments.

I can't blame them. Walking the straight and narrow is always hardest to do when one has only a love for intellectual freedom to preserve one's sense of balance.

* * * *

A strange midnight email swept across the Local U.'s fiber-optic freeways, a hastily-written, chilling dispatch to virtually all of Oxford Fucking Ohio. With diplomacy as subtle as a hatchet to the face, the email let the Online World know about the supposed hate speech that had defiled the hallowed grounds of the Public Ivy:

"...I strongly condemn this display and deplore that in this campus community any person would believe this display is in any way acceptable. We must redouble our efforts as a community to educate every student here on the historic patterns of racism in this society..."

A group of students had - gasp! - hung nooses from the branches of a tree! And students and the public watched helplessly as the cads dangled historic symbols of hatred and injustice before their innocent eyes. The fiends even dared to plead ignorance to this fact, and - Thank Goodness! - the local police confronted them and removed the vile, hideous hangman's tools before the poor, defenseless children and something called the African-American community saw it!

"Oh Thank God! That kind of shit needs to be- "

I caught myself, mid-sentence, as I read from the comfy confines of my bed Wednesday morning. I almost choked to death on my bowl of Biblically-inspired organic cereal, the taste of guilt like blood on my tongue.

"- needs to be censored by a state-funded, public university?

"Waitagoddamnminute... even the Ku Klux Klan has the right to express itself... religious groups, campus activists, the staff union, even the pro-anorexia advocates... "

I lost my appetite. I felt sick to my stomach.

"'...Redouble our efforts to educate the students?' What the fuck does that mean?"

And when did a display has to be "acceptable" to a campus community to be considered acceptable under the First Amendment? Regardless of intent, or public perception, was this, possibly protected speech? Could a marketplace of ideas sell off civil liberties like dime store junk?

Happy Halloween, folks.

One American university decided to go trick-or-treating this year, all dressed up as a Police State. And it went about toilet-papering mailboxes at midnight, wiping everyone's ass with the Bill of Rights in the name of a justice not seen in Ohio since Kent State.

* * * *

And those no-good, evil proponents of hate who'd dared to hang a noose in the era of Jena Six hype, where we're taught scream racism! at the sight of a rope?

Art students. Aspiring artists who sought nothing more than the satisfactory completion of a course requirement. The group was preparing a faculty-approved public exhibit as part of a class assignment.

The students tried to explain themselves and did remove their work the moment they realized that the project offended their peers - or, at least, the mob that confronted them.

They had a cool idea, to turn a reviled symbol into art, something beautiful and thoughtful.

But, by the time that information was made publicly available, their own university had already portrayed them as ignorant savages bent on creating racial unrest in a press release. The same mob bastardization of justice that, historically, has led to actual lynchings in this country sentenced them before the facts were presented.

Yes, there was indeed a hate crime committed in Oxford this week. The teachers took a few nooses and executed the creative rights of their students, without so much as a show trial, sentenced to censorship before any formal investigation or disciplinary hearing.

* * * *

The theme of the installation, I've learned, concerned the imagery of life and death - the final product was to include a tire swing, symbolic of the innocence of carefree youth, and the slipknots were to represent their ancient purpose - death.

The theme, along with the choice of media, is eerily reminiscent of an early installation by one of this country's hottest young artists, Los Angeles-based Kori Newkirk. But at the Local U., well, maybe a critically-acclaimed black artist wouldn't have to ask for permission before recreating his startling Swings in the Family Tree as part of his homework.

Maybe, in a climate of fear, in a land where black rap artists are called before Congress for offending the mythological, unified African-American Community, where John Denver and Twisted Sister once saved rock and roll from Tipper Gore, civil liberties are to be limited based on the color of one's skin, or by sexual orientation, or even age?

Maybe a straight woman can't create a sculpture that includes a police baton in tribute to the Stonewall Rebellion? Maybe a cowboy can't write poems based on Lakota and Apache war songs? Or maybe a German architect can't design a Holocaust museum?

Maybe we should ban nonblack hip-hop artists, or white blues musicians?

And maybe playing Billie Holiday in my office offends this campus community with strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees? Good God! I didn't fill out the paperwork first, ask for formal permission! And- gasp! - an Afro-Irish woman is singing noose lyrics written by a Jewish Communist schoolteacher! Somebody haul me down for sensitivity training!

Let us, then, ban other historic symbols of death and the artist themes they inspire. And the symbols of youthful innocence, too, for that matter.

Crosses? Have to go. Some people don't find reminders of Christ's execution acceptable in this campus community. Besides, someone might think, for instance, that a white man propping up a crucifix intends to set it ablaze - can't have that, can we?

Or how about trains? We've had two students die tragically this year along the tracks...

Or shall we ban the NROTC from marching with rifles because the majority of faculty find the Iraq situation reprehensible?

Oh hell...

Who needs free expression anyway?

We have diversity committees to tell us what to believe, curriculum committees to tell us what to teach, and government officials to tell us what is acceptable to all and deplorable to none - if we disagree, well, they'll just redouble their efforts to educate us...

* * * *

How I would've loved the chance to see probably one of the most thought - provoking art displays in this community's history. How I'd have loved the chance to watch undergraduates debate its meaning, to hear some faculty call it an affront to decency and to hear others call it genius.

How exciting it could've been. We could've used the opportunity to invite back one of the big alumnae, Rita Dove. Maybe the poet would've trashed the students' work. She may have found it inspiring, too, the innocent bravery of a few kids who turned a weapon into a statement about life. Or maybe ol' P.J. could've wrote about it, been lured back to teach a course on controversial literature?

Those opportunities are gone now. The display removed and the artists humiliated, the electronic strong-arm tactic will more than likely chill unpopular expression in this town to the artistic equivalent of absolute zero.

Why string up the artists for their deplorable rope sculpture? In the name of tolerance and diversity, it's just as easy to break spirits as it is to break necks.

After all, a noose has never been as terrifying as the lynch mobs behind them.

* * * *

Thursday afternoon, I witnessed one of the most miraculous signs that, yes, even a noose in a tree can bring about just the sort of dialogue a campus community needs.

And not the kind the writers of the official Local U. emails urged with iron fist, either.

With every fence built upon censorship, there are always wild ones in the midst of the herd, looking for new ways to cut through the wires that were put up to protect them. And college students, through some glorious academic instinct, naturally despise attempts to double up their education - especially when that education comes at a price, well, that the tuition checks don't cover.

A black woman and a white woman were standing outside of my library as I stepped out for a quick cigarette. Both students, as per the norm on a soon-to-be Smoke Free Campus, had been waiting for a fellow smoker to exit.

"Girl, please. Somebody needs to raise the roof on this."

"I dunno. I mean, I think it was wrong and all, but-"

One undergraduate was defending policy, was riding on that fence, playing the politically-correct game that often feeds herds in pastures green with mob-rule grasses.

And the other?

Please.

Do you think an educated black woman needs an email in the middle of the night to tell her the difference between hate speech and an art project? When was the last time a hate group walked up to a tree, in broad daylight, and hung up a tire swing in protest?

Or wouldn't get annoyed with the fact that in nearly every class, some well-intentioned Caucasian had asked her about how she was doing, as if those art students she walked past Tuesday had actually tried to lynch her? Or wouldn't get annoyed by the fact everybody started screaming about a tree in Jena, Louisiana, before anybody asked the group why they were hanging nooses here?

"So because I'm black, I need a white man to tell me about how offended I am? I can't think for myself?"

You see, in Oxford Fucking Ohio, there are very real hate crimes that happen every day during the school year, ones that don't get histrionic emails sent off late into the night.

Ask the young Chinese-American student who's asked to tutor somebody in math, because, well, All Asians are good at that. Ask the gay undergrad who's been terrified to go on a date with another gay undergrad, because some drunk idiot may start yelling Fuck you, faggot! from a car window. And ask the black students, yes, which offense is greater - artists hanging a noose as part of an exhibit, or the stares young black men get in this town for wearing urban clothing in certain nightclubs?

The Local U. wanted dialogue on the meaning of discrimination.

Well, now, they've got one.

* * * *

I told both women about Dr. M, about the love for the First Amendment he instilled in me when I was an undergrad, about his call to give up riding other people's fences and to walk the path of the straight and narrow back towards the Rule of Law.

I heard Dr. M.'s voice in the back of my own sometimes self-righteous, fence-straddling mind, drowning out the voices on the sides of the fence:

"Let the Law prevail. Put your faith in the ability of the People, and freedom will win, Jason."

Both women agreed that that old bastard Media Law prof sounded like one hell of an educator.

And yes, he was.

* * * *

Loving free speech is harder than it looks.

Learning to walk the fence involves learning how to get a look at the big picture, what's really at stake, learning to weigh divine individual rights against the bloodlust of a lynch mob. It's only after looking at the whole spread that one can understand the value of a ranch, free of pastures and fences, bound only by the expanse of the law.

Censorship, sometimes, is indeed justified - some fences are needed to protect things like national security, trade secrets, confidential information, and rights to privacy. Mostly, however, censors pull miles of wire blindly, carve up the fields of nurturing thought for the sake of the few who'd rather just hide in Freedom's barn anyway.

Sure, maybe I'm just insensitive, just ig'nant of historic symbols of hate and injustice and of the need to redouble our efforts to tell students how to express themselves like good little automatons, in need of sensitivity training because I just love what that deplorable, courageous art.

But if a group of art students can't include nooses in an art installation, then librarians sure as hell shouldn't have the right to write about it.

So go ahead a lynch me, too.

Climb up here, up on this fence, and try it.

* * * *

“The most important aspect of freedom of speech is freedom to learn. All education is a continuous dialogue - questions and answers that pursue every problem on the horizon. That is the essence of academic freedom.”

- Wild Bill Douglas

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* For the aspiring writers, poets, essayists, painters, sculptors, and screenwriters; for the future political leaders, captains of industry, musicians, doctors, and other innovators at the Local U. And for David Banner, fellow Baton Rouge ex-pat and lover of the First Amendment, for telling the self-appointed leaders of "The African-American Community" to shut the fuck up about censoring art in the name of "decency," for challenging those Happy White Liberals on Capitol Hill who think Democratic suppression is better than Republican suppression, and for, yeah, doing more for Katrina victims than Public Ivy universities.

COLLECTIONS OF THE DAMNED: The Historical Records of Dead Men Are Never Worth More Than the Lives of Those Yet to Come

"Men at some time are masters of their fates. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings."

- Cassius, from Julius Caesar (I.ii.140–142)

SOMEWHERE IN SOUTHSIDE VIRGINIA (ZP) -- He almost wept as he showed me the largest piece from his personal collection, a lithograph print of the infamous Nathan Bedford Forrest, ringed in tiny black-and-white photographs.

My knees buckled for a moment, as if his shame suddenly became mine as the artifact changed hands for the first time since the 1970s. That weight pulled me down onto his couch as the strong desire to vomit almost overtook me.

If I hadn't been sitting on that couch, the amount of smug, smiling hate in those mugshots would've eaten me alive.

Even years later, I can still feel that old widower's couch devouring me in its plushness, comforting my body so my senses could absorb it all.

* * * *

Some of the most prominent citizens from my own corner of Virginia stared up from behind the glass, their younger 1950s selves captured forever in white robes, my memories of them as simply nice old men shattered like a ceramic Jesus in hell.

One of the men used to cut my hair - I have many fond memories of my time in his barber's chair. Another face, that of a prominent retailer, a friend to not only my family but of many, glowed with his beautiful, Tobacco Country smile - a shopkeeper by day, and a Grand Dragon by night.

The most exclusive of fraternities, one of White Protestant Male paranoia, from the end of the Second World War through the end of Vietnam, residents of counties with such regal, Old World names: Prince Edward, Charlotte, Lunenburg, Cumberland. They hailed from towns like Farmville and Keysville and Burkeville, from Victoria and Kenbridge and Darlington Heights.

I knew all but four of them, at some point in my life, personally. The four I didn't know had all died before I was even born. But the record of their time in the Ku Klux Klan had been trapped in that old man's closet, in that frame.

Up until that point, several years ago, they had all been men I respected. The grandparents of classmates and friends, men who'd mentored my mother through her years as a business owner in the area, men who gave me candy and free bottles of soda in their shops, told wonderful stories and who entertained me before I could even walk.

And for all of the anxiety and terrifying expectation...

I wasn't even shocked.

* * * *

The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.

- James Baldwin

The elderly man finally broke down as we went through this one box, one full of photographs and, of all things, a ledger.

This one branch of Virginia's Klan, during the 1950s and 1960s, operated like other popular fraternal organizations, like the Kiwanis or the Moose or the Shriners. Members paid dues, paid for their robes and hoods. They even contributed money for timber and fuel oil to hold their rituals.

And someone, probably the local chapter's Klabee, kept very detailed records.

More than 50 pages of writing in that one ledger, filled with addresses and old switchboard phone extensions - and, of course, names.

Names.

How many of these men knew that almost a half-century later, society would change so drastically? Did they know how wrong they were? Did they realize, like my old collector, that society would not remember them for working to save the South but as an instrument of terror, a symbol of intolerance and fear?

* * * *

It was the snapshots in that box, however, that offered real insight into the true dynamic that drove racism and prejudice in the South.

The origins of segregation and slavery lie not in the color of skin but in the gluttonous insanity of unchecked capitalism, a pursuit of wealth and power devoid of compassion, reason, and responsibility. The quest for money, guns, and land gave rise to the social construct of race in the New World, just as surely as the monarchist traditions of Europe gave rise to Stalinism, Fascism, and Nazism in the Old.

It was easy for slave owners to justify oppression as just another cost of doing business, for example. And after slavery, it was equally easy for white landowners to justify the system of sharecropping - a system propped up by Jim Crow policies designed to keep not only former slaves unable to escape agrarian servitude, but the descendants of the white non-landowning classes as well.

While the ledger detailed the business transactions of an organization, the basic bookkeeping that goes into any exchange of capital for privilege and property, the black-and-white images testified to the corrupting nature of the quest for profit.

One series of prints, banded together with an event program and several anti-integration pamphlets, spoke volumes about the true greedy, childish face of institutionalized racism:

The event, sponsored by a supposedly less-offensive white citizen's group dedicated to what in Virginia was known as the Massive Resistance Movement , touted the evening's keynote speech, about the dangers of integration to certain businesses and communities.

The speaker that night back in the 1950s was not George Wallace, or Gov. Byrd, or some other blowhard Southern Segregationist politician - the keynote was delivered, instead, by a prominent Negro leader speaking, supposedly, on behalf of concerned colored business owners.

And in the photographs, I beheld an interesting rider upon a very different pale horse - a black community leader and racial separatist, preaching to a Caucasian choir, with the Confederate colors flying above him. In some of the prints, he posed with old Daughters of the Confederacy ladies and with local football heroes from the all-white public high school.

And he posed with some of those same Klansmen, too, shook their hands and smiled beneath the ol' Stars and Bars. Sure, the Klan hadn't shown up in robes and hoods. There wasn't a flaming cross anywhere to be found. After all, who would want to offend a business partner?

And, I remember the old man explaining, many white folks had no problem with a Negro leader who blamed the social disturbances and protests of the era on what they saw as the real threat to America - the Northern pinkos and godless Muslims, the flashy Hollywood communists, and, of course, the Jews.

And again, nothing shocking. Does anyone really think there were no black men who supported, who prospered under the laws of the Old South? And that those same men never did business with white supremacists?

Makes perfect sense, actually, in a time when the whole of society was based on a flawed separate-but-equal system, including the economics. The elimination of segregated facilities and services signaled the death-knell for race-based businesses, both black and white.

Who, at the dawn of the dreaded Big Box Stores, would want to keep paying for the right to shop free of other races, for a Whites Only section, would continue to pay extra for it, as competition grew? And did anyone think that black folk really wanted to pay more for a dozen oranges at the Colored grocery than at one of those new-fangled, integrated supermarkets?

* * * *

It took five years' worth of correspondence to get the old man to even discuss the his activities, much less admit that he'd been a member of an organization that once corrupted the minds of many decent folks, a blasted society that fed on its members' fear of change as much as it fed upon the fear of the outside world.

At one point, it was an obsession - to expose something called the truth, the righteous concept of social justice driven by a personal need, a self-righteousness more akin to that of a lynch mob than to anything else. I'd planned a book, done the library research, studied my prey like a scholarly assassin.

I needed dirt to throw upon the graves of my enemies, the ghosts of the Old South. I didn't, at the time, care who I hurt. Hurt was, at the time, just what I intended to cause, through my quest to expose the truth. I'd made the mistake of so many, those who mistake arrogance for social justice - I'd passed sentence well before I'd judged the crime.

Though the mid-20th century Ku Klux Klan in Southside Virginia was abhorrent, it never was the violent terror that plagued the American Deep South. Sure, there were cross-burnings, and hateful speeches, and even acts of intimidation. But for the most part, history seems to record that its leaders failed to convince the majority of white folks in the area that their black neighbors were somehow deserving of violence. It wasn't the dreaded midnight monster of the 1800s or early 1900s. And, by most accounts, it was nowhere near as insane as the current White Pride movements.

Even a clergyman, a leader at a historically black church and veteran of the Civil Rights Movement I'd interviewed early on in my pursuit of truth, back when I was still in high school, wondered why a white boy would want to dig up such skeletons.

It took me watching an old man cry over his sins, the sins that terrified him as he prepared to meet his Creator, to understand that my quest to expose the truth looked a whole hell of a lot like the sort of insanity groups like the Klan generate.

What right does anyone have to sacrifice the future in order to preserve the past?

* * * *

Come to hate hypocrisy and the evil thought; for it is the thought that gives birth to hypocrisy; but hypocrisy is far from truth.

- Christ, according to The Apocryphon of James
[Jung Codex, Nag Hammadi Library]

I asked the curator of the Collection of the Damned why he'd left the Klan, why his incarnation had disappeared into barely an urban legend, a silenced joke without a punchline.

It was, strangely enough, Martin Luther King, Jr. Not the man, or the minister, or even the activist.

Dr. King's corpse changed him, changed his view of the Nig'ra people, saved him from becoming just another hateful man damned to a cultural hell of stagnation and bitterness.

You see, sometime after King's assassination, while the evening newscasters rattled off tributes and the newspapers ran stories of mourning and the demands for justice, the old man realized something that probably changed a lot of men like him.

King was a Baptist like the curator, a Southerner like the curator. King had won the Nobel Peace Prize, had preached nonviolence and tolerance, and had died at the hands of a coward. A coward who, well, held the same views the curator held, who'd sought to silence agitators and protect the Old South - who'd taken fear to the point of murder.

And while those Klan meetings often began with prayers to God for guidance, nobody ever brought up that hating thy neighbor was, indeed, a sin, that murder was a sin.

The old man told me that it took days for him to remember what that sort of propaganda reminded him of. It kicked like a mule when he finally figured out the connection between his fraternity and the murder of a Nobel Prize winner and fellow Southern Baptist.

Europe.

He'd heard it in Europe, seen it as he'd marched across a continent towards the stronghold of a madman from Austria, witnessed what hate and murder really cost a man, a nation, a continent.

Adolf Hitler's not remembered for preserving Europe's traditions, either.

* * * *

I asked him what he intended to do with them after he'd confessed his sins, had asked for absolution in the form of the kind of anonymity that only a young man can grant a man close to death.

He didn't know.

But he did know that he didn't want his descendants to ever know and figured that the rest of his former knights probably wouldn't want their descendants to suffer for their sins, either. And that Negro leader? What price would his family pay?

Men, armed with such records, could blackmail, could drive others to murder others as James Earl Ray did, could seek not reconciliation but lustful, bloody revenge in the name of social justice. People are fallible, will punish whole generations for the sins of their ancestors, will reign destruction upon the brows of the countless innocent.

Let's be realistic here: People kill to acquire such records. And people will murder their own kin to bury it.

He offered me the records. I declined. I have no right to such power. And I had no right to risk the safety of my own Virginia kinfolk, either.

Information is, indeed, the most brutal form of power - and power can corrupt even a young man's promises to the old, corrupt his honor for things like money or some sense of self-importance.

I offered him a solution, however - a way to be free.

* * * *

I spent $40,000 on graduate school, learned the proper ways to select and preserve historical records, to digitize them and make them available for future generations.

Sometimes, one just has to accept that teaching a man how to un-preserve the past means more to the future than any amount of academic argument.

On my last trip back to Virginia, prior to my most recent journey, I learned that that old man has moved on, has been called back to His Father, Who Art in Heaven.

I have no clue what happened to those records, but I have a good idea.

But I'm sure, wherever he is, that he got a chance to meet that fellow Baptist Southerner, to be free at last, free at last...

And my notes have conveniently disappeared, and that book will never be published. Names? Well, my memory isn't what it used to be...

* * * *

For to be free is not merely to cast off one's chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.

- Nelson Mandela

It's the last week of September. I'm staring up at the new town hall in Farmville, the county seat of my home, built atop the ruins of a former strip mall that'd burned at the turn of the century.

I'm sipping on a cup of Joe from one of several coffee shops that now dot Downtown. When I was in high school, there was nothing remotely resembling a coffee shop in downtown Farmville. And now, on this trip back, in 2007, there are independents and national chains to choose from - I even found a shop that serves the best fairly-traded, organic Ethiopian blend.

It's a Wednesday, midmorning, and Main Street's a happening place. For more than 20 years, for most of my childhood, it'd been the home to not progress but the economic abandonment that plagues many small Southern communities.

But now, today, a group of international undergrads from the local college, speaking what sounds like Mandarin, pass behind me, bags full of touristy items clamoring as loud as their conversation. A black police officer, up the street, pulls over a pick-up full of white teenagers for violating the town's new noise ordinance, for playing G-Unit tunes too loud in a business district. An artsy-looking woman, plain and strangely beautiful, snaps photographs in front of the county courthouse.

Art. It's everywhere in town these days. There's even a museum where an abandoned department store used to be, on the corner of Third and Main. Plasma screen TVs fill its plate-glass storefront, a multimedia exhibit that wouldn't have been possible in 1996, much less 1956.

I turn on my heels, head south on Main. I walk past the site of the old State Theatre, remembering that my parents took me to see Fox and the Hound at a corner that now serves as an outdoor park and amphitheater. New brick high-rise apartments cast shadows down on the real estate beneath them - they're built atop property that once contained a decrepit shopping center, a liquor store, and a parking lot full of midnight drug dealers.

I stop in front of a Baptist church that now rests beneath the shadows cast by the high-rises, a church founded by former slaves, right after the U.S. Civil War.

A sign proudly proclaims that Martin Luther King once spoke there, proudly proclaims its place in history.

Without that visit by that martyred Baptist peacemaker, I wouldn't exist. I wouldn't have graduated from what became one of the most successfully integrated public school systems in North America. I couldn't proudly proclaim that I come from a community that spawned the most successful, peaceful student protest in U.S. history, a small town on the outskirts of change so monumental that some of its records are stored in places like the Library of Congress.

And King did more than simply visit, than simply speak and inspire during his lifetime. Even in death, he helped drive another nail in the coffin of one of the darkest times in Prince Edward's history.

He liberated a Klansman from his hate.

And he freed a bit of my soul, too, in the process.

The importance of burying the past, sometimes, paves the way for a greater future.

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