Friday, April 3

Reflection from Nancy Osborne

Like many of you, I expect, I’ve wondered about why we celebrate this day and call it Good Friday. Dan Snyder said it this way: “The Friday we call ‘good’ is about an execution. There was nothing good about it…. Jesus was executed for the single reason that the healing truths that he taught unmasked the powers…and cut to the root of the domination system.”

- Daniel O. Snyder, Praying in the Dark

So Jesus of Nazarreth, 33 years old, after a life committed to radical non-violent love, was condemned for blasphemy and executed to maintain order. Mocked, scourged and forced to carry his cross to Golgotha, Jesus was hung and died in agony, apparently from asphyxiation. 

And at the spot where we will gather tonight, Hezekiah Rankin was lynched in 1891. A 28 year old man who had come from Elmwood, NC, a small town between Statesville and Salisbury, to work on the Western NC Railroad. He was seized by a mob of white railroad employees after a work dispute and hung from a tree along the French Broad River, just south of Smith’s Bridge, now the I-240 bridge. 

Please join us tonight at the Craven Street Bridge, where Craven Street, Emma Road, and Hazel Mill Road come together. You can see the location HERE.  

Because still today, “the death penalty is another Confederate monument we must tear down” (Henderson Hill). Black defendants are far more likely to be wrongly convicted, and people of color make up 60 percent of our death row even though only 30 percent of our population.

Racist Roots: Origins of North Carolina's Death Penalty

Racist Roots (RacistRoots.org) is a project of the Center for Death Penalty Litigation, in collaboration with scholars, advocates, historians, artists, poets and people directly affected by the death penalty. It aims to place North Carolina’s modern death penalty with the context of 400 years of history and to expose its deep entanglement with the aims of white supremacy.

O God, Forgive us.