The lynching of Sonya Massey’s ancestor makes her murder by the police a tragic echo

According to the family of Sonya Massey, the 36-year-old mother of two who was shot and killed by an Illinois deputy on July 6, she was a descendant of William K. Donnegan, who had been a shoemaker and conductor on the Underground Railroad before he was lynched by a white mob during the Springfield race riots of 1908. Massey, they say, died in the same hospital, St. John’s, where Donnegan died after his white attackers slit his throat and hung him from a tree outside his house.

Like Massey, I am the descendant of a black man who was lynched. My great-grandfather, Burt Bridges, was hanged from a tree in Mississippi in 1904.

Like Massey, I am the descendant of a black man who was lynched. My great-grandfather, Burt Bridges, was hanged from a tree in Mississippi in 1904. His son, Houston Buckley, whom I called Dad, never knew his father because he was born after that murder. In the 1980s, when I was a child and Dad was in his early 80s, I would see him sitting in his old green armchair in the living room, his head buried in his hands, sobbing, “Those white people lynched my daddy.”

When she married young Houston, Grandmother could not have known that he would mourn his murdered father in his final years. That day, from the kitchen door, she urged him to pull himself together and “let bygones be bygones.”

Yet the past has an ugly way of refusing to stay in place. It took 20 years for me to publish We Are Bridges, an autobiography I wrote to explore how this violent part of our past has affected my family across generations, to try to heal the broken parts of myself and to pass on the stories of our ancestors — including their beauty, laughter, and talents — to my son and generations yet unborn. Admittedly, it is a noble attempt to build a bridge between past, present, and future. It is my personal contribution to an ongoing fight against racism and patriarchy. And yet, as I wrote and revised the manuscript over the years, the ugliest parts of the past kept trying to overtake any progress. With one eye on the news and the other on my manuscript in development, I tried to make sense of the unjust killings of Black people—Sean Bell, Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, Trayvon Martin, Philando Castile, Tamir Rice, Alton Sterling, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd—that were happening in real time.

Last week, as I was walking home from work, the craving for homemade nachos hit me like a head-on collision. It wasn’t until I was standing over my cutting board, chopping onions and garlic for beans, that the source of the sudden craving dawned on me:

Sonia Massey.

I had seen Massey’s son, Malachi, tell a CBS News reporter how much he loved his mother’s cooking, describing her as a loving “bundle of energy.” And I had read an article in which one of her cousins ​​praised her chicken nachos.

As I ate the food I had prepared, I felt a pain that seemed to stretch through time and space. This desire, I realized, represented an insatiable demand for law enforcement to end the tradition of lynching in this country.

After responding to Massey’s 911 call about a possible burglar outside her Springfield, Illinois home, Sangamon County Sheriff’s Deputy Sean Grayson shot and killed Massey while she was in her kitchen. Kitchen. The place from which she conjured up culinary delights for herself and her loved ones.

Bodycam footage shows that Grayson, who was fired and is charged with first-degree murder, sent her to the kitchen to put out a pot of boiling water. His profanity-laced threats to shoot her in the face and the bang of his gun as he did just that burned my ears. He shot her as she held the pot. She was a 36-year-old black mother whose family loved her, but that Grayson killed her shows he couldn’t see her humanity.

Maybe it’s just a coincidence that such incidents keep happening in presidential election years. George Floyd, 2020; Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, 2016. Trayvon Martin, 2012. Massey, 2024. Your ancestor Donnegan and my great-grandfather Burt Bridges were also lynched in presidential election years. I’m not saying there’s a connection — just that these aren’t unprecedented times, and that these crimes have often happened in the years when we’re most thinking about the future of our country. As a survivor of the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow laws (we’re here, after all), I’m disgusted and dismayed, but never shocked, by the domestic and racist terrorism that continues to permeate the “free world.”

Perhaps it is just a coincidence that incidents like this keep occurring in presidential election years.

I’m tired of writing and speaking about these injustices, but with every fatal shooting, beating, and chokehold, I hear my great-grandfather’s name. This is not a problem that Black people can solve. We’re done. The task of understanding the complexity of systemic violence and eradicating it rests squarely on the shoulders of people like Grayson and the institutions that empower them.

After watching the footage of Massey’s death, a deep, long, ugly scream shot from my stomach into my chest. I buried my face in a bath towel I was holding and screamed as loud as I could.

My tears were not just my own. I cried for and with Donna Massey, who burst into tears of unbearable grief over the loss of her daughter in this CBS News interview.

I also cried with my dad and for him.