An Evening with Chester Johnson, author of Damaged Heritage
St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery is pleased to welcome back J. Chester Johnson to discuss his most recent book, Damaged Heritage: The Elaine Race Massacre and A Story of Reconciliation. Please join us on July 17 at 7pm online via Zoom.
The book is a journey of racial reconciliation experienced by two Americans—one black and one white.
The Elaine Race Massacre, which took place in Arkansas in 1919, is arguably the worst racially-motivated incident on record for the nation against African-Americans. It has been effectively unknown for a century thanks to the whitewashing of history. It was whitewashed in Johnson’s own family, too. In 2014, Chester Johnson met Sheila Walker, a descendant of several Elaine Massacre victims. Over the next six years, the two, who were joined by the horrific conflagration, pursued a goal of racial reconciliation that stands in stark contrast to the murderous past that brought their forebears together.
The book, for which Walker wrote the foreword, describes how filiopietism (excessive reverence of the past and traditions) by whites in America permits damaged heritage to be transferred into continuous racism from generation to generation. It also offers a blueprint for how our pluralistic society can at last acknowledge—and repudiate—the sins of its past and begin a path toward true healing.
Poet and essayist J. Chester Johnson has written extensively on race and civil rights and is the author of several poetry collections.
A public finance specialist who has spent most of his adult life in New York City, Johnson served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of the U. S. Treasury Department under Jimmy Carter. He was educated at Harvard College and the University of Arkansas (Distinguished Alumnus Award, 2010). He served as co-chair for the Elaine Massacre Memorial Committee, which designed, constructed, and funded a structure that was dedicated on the Massacre’s centennial
“‘It is not permissible,’ wrote James Baldwin, ‘that the authors of devasta- tion should also be innocent . . . it is the innocence which constitutes the crime.’ In J. Chester Johnson’s Damaged Heritage, a native son has given up that threadbare old claim to white innocence, as he grapples with a beloved grandfather’s role in the Elaine Race Massacre of 1919, in which more than a hundred African American sharecroppers were killed. This is a heartfelt and deeply personal contribution to the literature of white remembrance, and a serious reckoning with the past.”
—Patrick Phillips, author of Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America