By John Krull
TheStatehouseFile.com

INDIANAPOLIS – The train of events that led to George Floyd’s death and the spectacle of the great north’s Twin Cities scorched with flame and smoke didn’t begin when he – allegedly – passed a counterfeit $20 bill at a convenience store.

Nor did it begin when at least three police officers pressed him face-down to the ground, one with his knee and full body weight bearing down on Floyd’s neck while the pinioned man gasped that he couldn’t breathe and called for his mother.

Nor did that train even start when Floyd was born African-American 46 years ago in a state that once fought in defense of slavery – or when he grew to be a burly black man in a nation that long has feared such men.

No, the forces that led to the tragedy in Minneapolis took shape before America even was a country, back when one set of human beings decided they had a right to own another set of human beings.

That horror is as much a part of our nation as the Declaration of Independence, the flag, the mountains, and the prairies. The blood spilled by Americans’ tortured struggles to come to terms with race flows like rivers across the land.

Perhaps America’s most abiding myth is that ours is a land of new beginnings, a place where human beings could shrug off the burdens and shackles of the past and begin anew.

It’s a pretty dream.

Our history, though, has confounded that dream from the beginning.

Many noticed, early on, the rank hypocrisy of proclaiming our country, to use Jefferson’s phrase, “an empire of liberty” while denying freedom to so many.

“How is that we hear the loudest yelps about liberty from the drivers of negroes?”  Samuel Johnson wrote in 1775, just as we were about to plunge into the Revolutionary War.

Our early history was a series of one near calamity after another as we tried, again and again, and failed, again and again, to grapple with being a nation that sought to liberate but could not stop enslaving.

We fought what remains the bloodiest civil war in human history and hoped all the blood shed when cousins fought cousins and brothers fought brothers would cleanse the land.

It didn’t.

We’re now more than a century and a half past the end of the Civil War. We’re still bedeviled – haunted – by the question of race.

That’s not surprising.

Those who had passed through the war’s trial knew it would not be that easy for America and Americans to come to terms with the wrong we’ve done.

“If God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether,’” Abraham Lincoln said in his second inaugural address, just weeks before he was murdered by a man who could not abide the thought of slaves walking free in the supposed land of the free.

If anything, Lincoln’s assessment that we would need to spend another quarter of a millennium atoning for the evils we committed now seems optimistic.

We live at present in a time when white supremacists and white nationalists have worked their way, plainly and unapologetically, back into the mainstream. When leaders from the nation’s statehouses to the White House embrace them.

Perhaps this is as it should be.

Because there is no way we ever will come to terms with our legacy of wrong if we don’t confront it every bit as plainly and unapologetically as the white supremacists advocate for ongoing oppression.

Until we do, the battle between what we Americans say we want to be – apostles of freedom – and what we have been and too often still are will continue.

And the burden it imposes on our souls will remain as heavy as the weight upon a dying man’s neck and as sad as his cries for his mother while he gasped his last breaths on one of our American streets.

The judgments of the Lord, after all, are true and righteous altogether.

FOOTNOTE: John Krull is director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students.