Closed-circuit camera footage shows Sandra Bland arriving at Waller County Jail in Hempstead, Texas, July 10. Three days later, she was found hanging in her cell. Photo: Waller County Sheriff's Office.
“Good morning, my beautiful kings and queens!” This is how Sandra Bland often began the more than two dozen videos she made before she was found hanged in a Texas jail on July 13. For months she posted the videos on Facebook and tagged them #SandySpeaks.
I “met” Bland the day her death went viral on social media. I was immediately drawn to her Facebook page because I knew something about Hempstead, the town where she was falsely arrested and then died. I’d been researching hundreds of pre–World War II interviews with elderly black Texans who had been slaves. Most of the interviews were conducted for the federal government and are accessible online through the Library of Congress.
The former slaves told of black men whipped and shot for refusing to work overtime in Jim Crow cotton fields and of a mother murdered after rejecting a white man’s demand that she send her seven-year-old son to work. Even religion was regulated. An old woman explained that whites in Hempstead would not let blacks meet in church after 10 p.m.
And there were the lynchings: from the 1870s to 1950, Waller County, of which Hempstead is the largest city, had one of the highest rates in Texas.
Sandra Bland's 'crime' was acting as she wanted you, me, and everyone to act: nobly.
So as Bland’s story spread, along with suspicions that she had been hanged by Texas police and officials, I seriously considered that the conspiracy theory might be true. Yet much of what we see on Facebook reinforces other evidence to suggest that she took her own life. Watching the videos reveals how sweet and strong Bland was, but her fragility, too, shows through.
She was generous, especially about racial healing. When she said, “Good morning, my kings and queens,” she made it clear that she wanted black people to ascend the throne of their humanity—yet she sincerely wished “kingdom” and “queendom” on white people, too. “My white people,” she called that demographic of her Facebook audience. “My videos are for everybody.” She meant it. Having grown up in the Chicago suburb Villa Park, where less than five percent of the population is black and where she was the only black member of her school cheerleading team, Bland had an ecumenical sensibility.
But she was firm in demanding that her white people understand what they and their ancestors have done to her race, how they have used and abused black people. “Without black people there would be no America,” she said. “Without us there is no you.” She had lessons for all. She went to a Starbucks in Naperville, near her home outside Chicago, with a sign addressed to blacks: “All White People are Not Against You.” Deeply religious, she told her subscribers of color, “The ultimate test in this life that God has placed on us: being able to deal with being black. Being able to show love to somebody who can hate you for no . . . reason . . . . It’s a hard job.”
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