Sunday’s sermon weaves together a few of the stories uncovered in decades of research into how events in our local and regional history reflect issues from our national past. These include the Shawnee Prophet’s murderous purging of purported Delaware ‘witches’; the near lynching of Frederick Douglass by pro-slavery ‘ruffians’ at Pendleton; and the notorious KKK terrorism of the 1920s culminating in the last lynching in the North, which took place at Marion in Aug. 1930. Regrettably, most of these incidents are absent from our schools’ history and social studies curricula and remain largely unknown to the populace at large. When it comes to bigotry, hatred, and mass violence justified by religious belief, ignorance is not bliss! The act of remembering these past traumas in situ is the first step toward reconciliation. While we are not responsible for the malign actions of our forebears, we are morally obligated to be accountable for the ways that unacknowledged collective trauma can redound imperceptibly across generations.
