Duke professor talks Civil Rights Movement, disproportionate violence for African-Americans

“Violence structures everyday life,” said Adriane Lentz-Smith to a crowd of about 50 UNC students and faculty in Chapman Hall Friday.

Lentz-Smith, a history professor at Duke University, gave a lecture for the Department of African, African-American and Diaspora Studies’ annual student research conference titled “‘The Laws Have Hurt Me’: State Violence and the Rebirth of White Supremacy.”

She began the lecture with the story of Sandra Bland — a 28-year old African-American woman who was pulled over for failing to signal while changing lanes and arrested after refusing to put out a cigarette. She was found dead in a Texas county jail three days after the arrest, on the morning of July 13, 2015, and her death was classified as suicide by hanging.

Lenz-Smith said these stories of police brutality reminded her of cases in the 1960s, before and during the Civil Rights Movement.

She said violence in the segregated South — implemented by police officers, politicians and bureaucrats — permeated the economy, domestic life, language and consciousness.

Lentz-Smith spoke about how gender acts as a terrain for fighting political questions of domination, subordination, authority and autonomy.

“White supremacists have long deployed sexualized violence as a weapon of terror aimed at the entire black community and intended to break both bodies and spirits,” she said.

She said Sandra Bland would have been aware of the history of sexual violence toward African-American women when she insistently shouted, “Don’t touch me” to the trooper as shown in the arrest footage.

Shifting topics from gender to self-defense, she said armed resistance is not necessarily the opposite of nonviolence.

“Armed resistance couldn’t keep everyone safe but it did protect the movement by preserving space for activists to implement the changes promised by civil rights movements,” Lentz-Smith said.

She said the government and news media are using the rhetoric of law and order to limit black humanity in the era of mass incarceration and to blame black criminality, not white supremacy, for the cause of racial violence.

“Reaction to black militancy demonstrated white Americans’ preference for order over justice,” she said.

She ended the lecture by saying it is important not to deny ongoing everyday violence because violence did and does shape the contours of the black freedom struggle.

Nya Moore, a first-year psychology major, said the lecture gave her many different ways to understand the Civil Rights Movement and how it is an ongoing struggle.

The lecture also brought to mind some modern political debates, said Max Levin, a senior comparative literature major.

“I think her questions about the way that criminal justice and being tough on crime is like an evolution of racist state violence is really interesting, and that made me think of President (Bill) Clinton and Hillary Clinton’s support of bills that were tough on crime, that disproportionately hurt African-Americans, so that was really interesting to me,” he said.

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