1.
My 10-year old daughter and I visit Pleasant Gardens Cemetery on a day typical for August in Chattanooga. The sun pushes its way through haze, which turns the sky a milky white. Soaring summer temperatures and high humidity create a physical obstacle we have to press through. A few yards from the road, I feel the sweat beneath my shirt, running down my back.
There is another cemetery nearby—walled and gated, with manicured grass. But Pleasant Gardens is abandoned. It is overgrown and unkempt. Tree trunks gnarl their way out of the dirt. Their limbs block the sky, and we pick our way through the undergrowth. The temperature drops a few degrees, but whatever hint of a breeze there might be this evening, inside the cemetery the air is still and quiet. The noise from the street doesn’t penetrate the tangles of vine that line the cemetery’s outer edge.
We walk past headstones. Many lie flat in the underbrush, cracked and weathered into anonymity. We step carefully to avoid the small depressions that litter the hillside—graves exhumed or sunken with time. Walking deeper into the cemetery beneath the canopy of leaves, we find more, and I realize this place is larger than it appears from the outside. It is not easy to find our destination: Ed Johnson’s resting place.
My daughter is naturally curious, as any child asked to visit an abandoned cemetery on an early weekday evening would be. I’m not sure how to tell her this story, one I’ve only recently learned myself, but she needs to know it. She needs to know that a lynch mob, drunk with bloodlust, dragged an innocent man from his cell to a river bluff, where a span of wood, steel and iron was his gallows. She knows Americans have walked on the moon; she also needs to know we have murdered each other for nothing more profound than skin color. The darkness in our past reveals as much about who we are as the light.
2.
In my hometown of Chattanooga we love to tell stories about ourselves. We’re proud of the urban renaissance that has transformed our dirty manufacturing town into a jewel of the southern foothills. Pivotal battles of the Civil War were fought along the river and on our mountains and ridges, and pictures of Ulysses S. Grant taken atop nearby Lookout Mountain adorn downtown offices and restaurants. But there are other stories we tell less often.
When the weather is nice, locals and visitors flock to the Walnut Street Bridge, the city’s centerpiece, to watch fireworks, listen to music, or sit with a coffee to enjoy the sunset. More than 120 years old and long fallen into disrepair, the bridge’s rehabilitation was one of the first steps taken to revitalize the city. It connects downtown with a string of parks and shops on the north shore of the Tennessee River and provides gorgeous views of the surrounding ridges and mountains. But not all Chattanooga citizens are comfortable visiting this bridge.
Ed Johnson lived nearby in the early 1900s. He worked as a carpenter, a stonemason, and at a local bar on the Georgia state line called The Last Chance Saloon, because it was the last chance to buy alcohol before entering north Georgia’s dry counties.
In 1906, Johnson, an African-American, was accused of attacking a white woman and found guilty in a trial so egregious that the U.S. Supreme Court issued a stay of execution. Furious Chattanoogans, including several sheriff deputies, lynched Johnson, hanging him from the second span of the county bridge—now, the Walnut Street Bridge.
Civil War monuments litter this town, built to honor both Union and Confederate troops. There is no memorial to Johnson, though efforts are finally underway to change this. It’s easy to figure out why it has taken so long. What happened to Johnson complicates the stories we Chattanoogans like to tell about ourselves.
The fact I have walked beneath the iron spans of the Walnut Street Bridge so many times without knowing their horror feels like sacrilege. Yet, how many times have I let a memory slip because it was inconvenient to my own story? Johnson’s final words before he was murdered were “God bless you all. I am an innocent man.”
Am I?
3.
I sat on this essay for well over a year—perhaps because I tend to reflect on an idea for a long time before committing it to paper, perhaps because I hesitate to explore a topic so fraught with my own discomfort and emotion.
It was the recent arson at the Highlander Center in east Tennessee, and the vulgarity in the form of a white power symbol left spray-painted nearby, that brought to the surface what I should not have left buried.
The old Highlander building, which housed a school for activists at the height of the civil rights movement, is unassuming in the way of places whose import is only fully grasped on the other side of history. Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks and John Lewis passed through its doors and trained a generation of revolutionaries in the art of non-violent resistance. Despite living much of my life within minutes of its location, I was never told this story either.
The Highlander Center was forced to move decades ago when Tennessee revoked its charter. So the building that burned was not the original Highlander near my home, but the subsequent location in New Market, Tennessee.
The arson destroyed thousands of documents and historical artifacts from the Civil Rights era—stories consumed by flame, like crosses before them, or black churches today. Our legacy of hate still devours, its appetite unabated.
We’re still not telling many of our stories, and we’re still fighting the war that raged across so much of the Southeast 150 years ago. Some say we shouldn’t rewrite history by removing Confederate monuments, but for people like Ed Johnson, history has yet to be written at all.
4.
Johnson, for his virtual anonymity, is the “famous” one buried at Pleasant Gardens. There are thousands of graves, many almost invisible beneath the dirt. How many unremembered stories lay beneath these broken headstones? Racism murdered Johnson in a paroxysm of violence. How many lives here did it murder slowly, silently?
Cemeteries are rich with memory. Loved ones, standing beside the graves of those they’ve lost, relive the past. But the living rarely visit Pleasant Gardens, and the air here is thick with memories unremembered. They drift just out of reach, obscured by time and neglect. How many thousands of people scattered across the United States can trace their stories back to these few acres of earth?
My daughter and I are trespassing on sacred ground, and I begin to feel we should not have come. We are looking for Johnson’s grave, but there are so many others here. Others who did not ask for this attention. Who want only to rest peacefully, and be visited by those they loved, not by a father giving a history lesson.
Confusion clouds my daughter’s face as I tell her what happened to the man whose grave we are searching for. It’s a reminder that the kind of hate that murdered Johnson is learned, not innate. As surely as the color of our skin, the sins of one generation pass on to the next.
“It doesn’t make any sense,” she says when I finish.
“I know it doesn’t,” I reply, helpless to summon further explanation.
We find Johnson’s headstone, worn but readable, now more than 100 years old. This legend that I’m only beginning to learn becomes real. Johnson’s body lies buried beneath us, surrounded by leaves and grass. Trees arc overhead, blocking the early evening sun.
