David Oshinsky Lecture
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Wolran Kim
Mar. 2012


David Oshinsky (1944~) is a leading historian of modern American politics and culture. He holds the Jack S. Blanton Chair in History at The University of Texas at Austin, and is a distinguished scholar in residence at New York University. He is the author of A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy, Worse Than Slavery and Polio: An American Story, and is the winner of a Pulitzer Prize, Hoover Presidential Book Award, etc. His essays and reviews appear regularly in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other national publications.

His presentation was about his New York Times investigation that helped bring justice to the 1964 "Mississippi Burning" civil rights murders. On June 20, 1964, Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner met in Mississippi to help train volunteers for a statewide voter registration drive, as part of the "Freedom Summer." One day later, they lost their lives at the hands of Ku Klux Klan members in the rural Neshoba County. This act of violence spurned one of the largest F.B.I. manhunts in U.S. history, lasting six weeks, culminating with the discovery of the bodies of the victims. Although seven men were convicted on federal civil rights charges, the perpetrators never faced state murder charges.

Edgar Ray “Preacher” Killen (1925~) was a Southern Baptist minister and Ku Klux Klan organizer who conspired in the murders of three civil rights activists in 1964. He was found guilty of three counts of manslaughter in 2005, the forty-first anniversary of the crime. Killen was released as not guilty at that time because one of the juries held up his charge. He appealed the verdict, but his sentence of three times 20 years in prison was upheld in 2007, by the Mississippi Supreme Court.

Dr. Oshinsky also talked about his harrowing experience in 1998 when he, his son, and a New York Times photographer visited the preacher Edgar Ray Killen, a suspect in the Mississippi files case. This case revealed the overt lynching of African Americans in those days in the South, and all suspects were released even before the expiration of their sentences, after being convicted for three to ten years. This case was put on film, Mississippi Burning by Alan Parker, and is widely known. I watched this movie twenty years ago, and could imagine how black history actually was.

Dr. Oshinsky said that the vestiges of slavery still remain in southern areas such as Mississippi. All societies live with prejudice and discrimination of color, appearance, wealth, and academic status. I also have different feelings when I see different colored people or cultures. These kinds of preconceptions turn into superiority and discrimination. Racial consciousness discriminates, commits violence, and even murders other races with the only reason being that they are not the same.

Racism was spread for colonialization and expansion of territory throughout all of human history. Even in the present day, race antagonism and conflict are all over the world. 18th century Enlightenment philosophers, Kant and Hume, even thought that dark colored skin is proof for being a fool. Scientific racism in the 19th century had been trying to prove that the black and yellow races are inferior, and women and lower races have lower abilities of reasoning than white males. These differences were used to justify political discrimination and even restrictions of civil rights.

A Black History of the United States is much more dramatic and impressive than any movie or novel. Approximately over 60 million black people have died in a brutal manner for the last three hundred years. Prejudice against black people, who came to Virginia as slaves in the 17th century, still has not disappeared since Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. Jim Crow laws that separate white and colored people in public areas remained in the south until the 1954 Supreme Court judgment. Today’s freedom and equality came from numerous people’s sacrifices and efforts such as those of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Jesse Louis Jackson. Ali Rattansi said in his book, RACISM-A Very Short Introduction, there is no race, but there is only racism. A Black History in United States from small efforts like those of Dr. Oshinsky’s, is the valuable lesson to recognize in greatness of overcoming racism and sustaining the dignity of human beings.