Combat
Brigadier General
- Joined
- Jun 10, 2005
- Messages
- 10,486
Sad and interesting story from CNN - the entire article can be found on cnn.com:
Marion, Arkansas (CNN) -- A traditional three-shot volley salute and the solemn sound of taps echoed across the black cemetery in the Delta flatlands of Arkansas, just across the Mississippi River from Memphis, Tennessee.
The military honors were followed by the jubilant singing of "Amazing Grace." The service had been five decades in the making.
Everyone was here to honor Isadore Banks, an African-American veteran of World War I who was chained to a tree in June 1954, doused in gasoline and burned beyond recognition.
The slaying -- a year before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to whites on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama -- remains one of the nation's oldest unsolved civil rights cases.
"This has been a long time coming," said Marcelina Williams, a granddaughter who worked with the Army to arrange Monday's ceremony after she found her grandfather's military records. "Bless our country with freedom and righteousness."
A pillar in the African-American community, Banks helped bring electricity to the town of Marion in the 1920s and became one of the wealthiest black landowners in a region with a long history of racial violence.
His killing had a profound effect. Many blacks left and never came back. For those who remained, the message was clear: If you were black and acquired wealth, you knew your place.
Blacks from all around would come to the killing site -- to look at the oak sapling, to pray and to never forget. It seems most everyone in Crittenden County's black community had a hunch who was responsible.
To this day, some elders still name names. Yet they say no investigators ever interviewed them.
Marion, Arkansas (CNN) -- A traditional three-shot volley salute and the solemn sound of taps echoed across the black cemetery in the Delta flatlands of Arkansas, just across the Mississippi River from Memphis, Tennessee.
The military honors were followed by the jubilant singing of "Amazing Grace." The service had been five decades in the making.
Everyone was here to honor Isadore Banks, an African-American veteran of World War I who was chained to a tree in June 1954, doused in gasoline and burned beyond recognition.
The slaying -- a year before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to whites on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama -- remains one of the nation's oldest unsolved civil rights cases.
"This has been a long time coming," said Marcelina Williams, a granddaughter who worked with the Army to arrange Monday's ceremony after she found her grandfather's military records. "Bless our country with freedom and righteousness."
A pillar in the African-American community, Banks helped bring electricity to the town of Marion in the 1920s and became one of the wealthiest black landowners in a region with a long history of racial violence.
His killing had a profound effect. Many blacks left and never came back. For those who remained, the message was clear: If you were black and acquired wealth, you knew your place.
Blacks from all around would come to the killing site -- to look at the oak sapling, to pray and to never forget. It seems most everyone in Crittenden County's black community had a hunch who was responsible.
To this day, some elders still name names. Yet they say no investigators ever interviewed them.
