Maceo Snipes
Witold Pilecki Look at these faces.
They are the faces of two indisputable heroes of justice, freedom and democracy.
Beyond that, Maceo Snipes and Witold Pilecki, men whom I suspect have never been mentioned in the same breath until now, had a few other things in common. Both had agrarian backgrounds although at opposite ends of the economic spectrum. Snipes was a sharecropper in the U.S. state of Georgia, Pilecki, the descendant of a noble Polish farming family. Both men served their country in the fight against fascism during World War II, Snipes as an enlisted man in the U.S. Army, Wilecki as an officer in the Polish Army and later, the Polish Resistance.
After the war, both men took a courageous stand which would cost them their lives. Both soldiers were killed not by foreign, enemy combatants, but by their own countrymen. And both were shunned, buried in unmarked graves, their actions and sacrifice virtually forgotten for decades.
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Along with roughly 1.2 million African American men and women who answered the call to serve their country during WWII, Maceo Snipes returned home to be treated exactly as he left, a second-class citizen.
However, things were beginning to change albeit at a snail's pace, especially in places like Taylor Country, Georgia where Snipes and his family worked the land they rented from a white man. In 1946, federal courts struck down a Georgia law preventing black people from voting in that state's gubernatorial primary elections. Proponents of the law stated that blacks could vote in the general election, but as Georgia at the time was essentially a one party (Democratic) state, general elections were mere formalities, the real choice came in the primaries.
Needless to say, that decision didn't go over well with the good ol' boys of the local chapter of the KKK who in no uncertain terms made it crystal clear that any black man or woman who dared turn out to vote in that particular election would be met with retribution.
On July 17, 1946, Maceo Snipes defied those well publicized threats and showed up to vote, making him the first black person to vote in a primary election in Taylor County. He would be the only black person in the county to vote in that particular election.
The next day, four Klan members made good on their promise. They showed up at Snipes' farm and shot him in the back. With his mother, Snipes was able to walk several miles for help. He ended up at the local hospital where he was forced to wait several hours to see a doctor. When the doctor finally got around to treating him, he informed Snipes that he'd need a blood transfusion but unfortunately there was no "black blood" available to save his life. In the Jim Crow South, blood was also segregated.
Maceo Snipes died of very treatable wounds two days after he was shot.
Adding insult to injury, the Klan put out word that anybody attending Snipes' funeral would meet the same fate he did. So, his uncle and the local undertaker buried Maceo Snipes in the middle of the night in an undisclosed location.
At their trial, the men who killed Snipes claimed they confronted him in order to collect on a ten-dollar debt. They testified that Snipes refused to pay up and drew a knife on them. The men pleaded self-defense in his killing.
Despite there being no evidence other than their word that Snipes either had a knife or owed them money, AND the fact that he was shot in the back, Snipe's murderers were exonerated.
But Maceo Snipes did not die in vain. His lynching, along with the lynchings of two married couples, including a pregnant woman the same week, inspired this letter to the editor, written by a 17-year-old student at Morehouse College:
I often find when decent treatment for the Negro is urged, a certain class of people hurry to raise the scarecrow of social mingling and intermarriage. These questions have nothing to do with the case. And most people who kick up this kind of dust know that it is simple dust to obscure the real question of rights and opportunities. It is fair to remember that almost the total of race mixture in America has come, not at Negro initiative, but by the acts of those very white men who talk loudest of race purity. We aren’t eager to marry white girls, and we would like to have our own girls left alone by both white toughs and white aristocrats.
We want and are entitled to the basic rights and opportunities of American citizens: The right to earn a living at work for which we are fitted by training and ability; equal opportunities in education, health, recreation, and similar public services; the right to vote; equality before the law; some of the same courtesy and manners that we ourselves bring to all human relations.
Years later the Reverend Martin Luther King Senior whose namesake son wrote those words, claimed that letter to the editor was the “intimation of [his son’s] developing greatness.”
It could be said that an entire movement was inspired by the death of Maceo Snipes.
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After participating in the futile battle against the German invasion of his country in the first days of September 1939, Captain Witold Pilecki, a cavalry officer and intelligence agent, became one of the founders of the Polish resistance. The following year, he volunteered for an extraordinary mission, to infiltrate a German internment camp in the Polish town of Oświęcim.
To enter the camp, he would have to allow himself to be arrested by the Germans which he did in September of 1940. Despite severe beatings, a near starvation diet and a bout with pneumonia, Pilecki managed to organize a group of follow prisoners to help undermine the efforts of their captors. This included helping improve prisoner morale, deliver news from the outside, distribute food and extra clothing, and set up intelligence networks to communicate the goings on inside the camp to the outside world.
That camp would become known to the world by the name the Germans gave it, Auschwitz.
From inside its walls, Pilecki bore firsthand witness to the depravity of what would become the most notorious of Nazi death camps. Doing so he provided valuable accounts of the horrors of the place to the allies, (who were skeptical of his reports), along with pleas to do something to debilitate the camp, all of which went unheeded.
All in all, Pilecki spent nearly two-and one-half years inside Auschwitz serving as the Allies' primary source of intelligence from the camp. When it became clear to him that his efforts were no longer fruitful, Pilecki with the help of other prisoners, escaped. He rejoined the Polish resistance as a soldier fighting the Nazis, participating in numerous campaigns including the Warsaw uprising of 1944, which resulted in him once again being captured by the Germans. He spent the remainder of the war in a POW camp.
One would think all of this would result in Pilecki immediately being hailed as a national hero by war's end, but it wasn't to be. Instead, Pilecki continued his work in the Polish underground, this time against the Soviet Union who would occupy his country after Europe was divided up amongst the allies after the War. In this capacity Pilecki worked steadfastly against another form of tyranny and oppression until his capture by the Polish Ministry of Public Security in May of 1947. Under the captivity of the Polish Communist Party completely under the influence of Joseph Stalin, Pilecki was brutally tortured in the hopes of obtaining information on fellow members of the anti-communist underground. Those efforts were unsuccessful. One year later, Pilecki was tried and convicted in a show trial, and shortly thereafter, executed.
Little was known of Witold Pilecki for the next forty years of Soviet hegemony during which time he was declared a traitor and an enemy of the state. It wasn't until his posthumous "rehabilitation" after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989, where his exceptional heroism was finally revealed and recognized.
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Until quite recently, I would have viewed these men purely as historical figures, heroes who lived during a thankfully bygone period of history, brilliant symbols of people whose struggles and personal sacrifice succeeded in making the world a better place for those of us who came after them. But recently my world view has changed and now I'm not so sure.
Had you told me six years ago that we'd soon be seeing the following, I would have said you were crazy:
- A grifter, hoodwinking seventy million Americans into believing that "only he" could fix this country's problems, if only they elected him President of the United States, which they did.
- Americans openly carrying Nazi and KKK flags, chanting racist slogans in public being called "fine people" by the president of the United States.
- The president of the United States openly embracing dictators and trashing our allies, leaders of democratic states.
- Thousands of that president's supporters inspired by his lie that an election was "stolen from him", attacking the most salient symbol of our democracy, the U.S. Capitol, in the hopes of overturning an American election.
- Employees of a national "news" network acting as personal advisors to the president during that attack, begging him (unsuccessfully) to call off the insurgents whom they knew were acting on his behalf, then turning around and telling their viewers that the insurgents were actually Democrats in disguise.
- Politicians from that failed president's party who rightfully condemned his actions, in a year's time doing a complete 180, taking back their words, purely out of fear of the former president and his supporters' wrath.
- One of the two major political parties working tirelessly to undo the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
- Members of that same party doing everything they can to ensure by whatever means possible, that they will never lose another election.
- And on and on...
So the battles of Maceo Snipes, Witold Pilecki and ountless others, are not battles of the past but, sad to say, ongoing battles.
I pray to God it won't come to pass that there will need to be blood shed in order to save our democracy and defeat once and for all the scourges of racism and fascism. I pray that good will, logic and common sense will prevail, and that no parent's child will have to suffer the fate of Maceo Snipes and Witold Pilecki in the fight to preserve decency and justice in our world.
But I assure you many are willing pick up their torch should the need arise.
Look at those faces above; they are indeed the faces of the BLM and ANTIFA movements of their day.
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