Burned Alive

On December 24, 2014 Jordanian Lieutenant Moaz Youssef al-Kasasbeh was captured by ISIS after his plane crashed during an airstrike over Syria. On February 3, 2015 ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) released a video showing the Jordanian pilot being burned alive.

The reaction from around the world was almost universal condemnation. From world leaders to men and women on the streets of the world, the barbarity and unspeakable cruelty of the execution of the Jordanian pilot was expressed repeatedly. The State of Jordan has vowed revenge on ISIS.

When I was a college student at Auburn University I worked for the campus radio station as a radio announcer. One of my programs was a talk show called “The Black Experience”. The program was inspired by another radio program that featured Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis that was called “The Story Hour”. On “The Black Experience”, me and my co-host Sylvia Little was given tremendous freedom to explore and discuss the full range of the Black Experience in America. When I heard about what ISIS had done to the Jordanian pilot I immediately thought about a program that we did at Auburn almost forty years ago. Sylvia read a poem by Richard Wright entitled “Between the World and Me”. It is an unforgettable, haunting poem that is a first person description of a Black man being lynched and burned to death.

Between 1865 and 1965 more than three thousand Black men and women were lynched in the United States. Some of them were hung, some were beaten to death, some were shot, and many were burned alive. None of them were waging war against their captors. They were simply victimized for being Black. There was no international condemnation of their murders, in fact there was no legal consequences at all. Their deaths were simply local entertainment.

Despite the fact that I had graduated from high school and was a senior in college, I was blissfully ignorant of these horrific crimes that had occurred in my own country for a hundred years. Not until I really listened to “Between the World and Me” was I able to internalize the enormity of the crime of burning another human being to death. For the last forty years I have carried the mental images created by Richard Wright in my subconscious mind. Last week, ISIS brought them back.

Sylvia read the poem slowly, purposefully, powerfully. I invite you to do the same…

And one morning while in the woods I stumbled
    suddenly upon the thing,
Stumbled upon it in a grassy clearing guarded by scaly
    oaks and elms
And the sooty details of the scene rose, thrusting
    themselves between the world and me....

There was a design of white bones slumbering forgottenly
    upon a cushion of ashes.
There was a charred stump of a sapling pointing a blunt
    finger accusingly at the sky.
There were torn tree limbs, tiny veins of burnt leaves, and
    a scorched coil of greasy hemp;
A vacant shoe, an empty tie, a ripped shirt, a lonely hat,
    and a pair of trousers stiff with black blood.
And upon the trampled grass were buttons, dead matches,
    butt-ends of cigars and cigarettes, peanut shells, a
    drained gin-flask, and a whore's lipstick;
Scattered traces of tar, restless arrays of feathers, and the
    lingering smell of gasoline.
And through the morning air the sun poured yellow
    surprise into the eye sockets of the stony skull....

And while I stood my mind was frozen within cold pity
    for the life that was gone.
The ground gripped my feet and my heart was circled by
    icy walls of fear--
The sun died in the sky; a night wind muttered in the
    grass and fumbled the leaves in the trees; the woods
    poured forth the hungry yelping of hounds; the
    darkness screamed with thirsty voices; and the witnesses rose and lived:
The dry bones stirred, rattled, lifted, melting themselves
    into my bones.
The grey ashes formed flesh firm and black, entering into
    my flesh.

The gin-flask passed from mouth to mouth, cigars and
    cigarettes glowed, the whore smeared lipstick red
    upon her lips,
And a thousand faces swirled around me, clamoring that
    my life be burned....

And then they had me, stripped me, battering my teeth
    into my throat till I swallowed my own blood.
My voice was drowned in the roar of their voices, and my
    black wet body slipped and rolled in their hands as
    they bound me to the sapling.
And my skin clung to the bubbling hot tar, falling from
    me in limp patches.
And the down and quills of the white feathers sank into
    my raw flesh, and I moaned in my agony.
Then my blood was cooled mercifully, cooled by a
    baptism of gasoline.
And in a blaze of red I leaped to the sky as pain rose like water, boiling my limbs
Panting, begging I clutched childlike, clutched to the hot
    sides of death.
Now I am dry bones and my face a stony skull staring in
    yellow surprise at the sun....

More than three thousand times in a hundred years… that scene played itself out in the United States of America. I don’t know if the world was unaware, or if the world didn’t care.

I am glad that this time the world said NO. This is not ok. This is not entertainment. This will not be tolerated. This is not acceptable in our world.

Thank God.