A01023 - Mamie Lang Kirkland, Witness to an Era of Racial Terror

Mamie Lang Kirkland died last month at her home in upstate New York. She was the mother of nine, the matriarch of another 158, a longtime saleswoman for Avon Products, and, at the time of her death, at 111, the oldest resident of Buffalo.

That only begins to describe Ms. Kirkland.

She was also the embodiment of the African-American experience of the 20th century, her life’s long journey altered repeatedly by the racial violence and bigotry coursing through the United States. Lynchings, riots, the Ku Klux Klan — she survived it all, and spent her centenarian years working to ensure that these realities never slipped from collective memory.

Her life helped inspire the creation, in 2018, of the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, in Montgomery, Ala. Both document the country’s history of racial terrorism and encourage social justice.

Ms. Kirkland figures in two of the exhibits, said Sia Sanneh, a senior attorney with the Equal Justice Initiative, the nonprofit that started the memorials. “Her life was such an inspiration to us,” Ms. Sanneh said. “It embodied all those things.”

Mamie Lang was born on Sept. 3, 1908, in the rural Mississippi town of Ellisville, the daughter of Edward Lang, a laborer and fledgling minister, and Rochelle (Moore) Lang, who minded the family’s rented home. Ms. Kirkland would remember the large peach tree in the yard, and the strange brew concocted by her grandmother that saved her from a typhomalarial fever when she was near death at age 5.

When she was about 7, her father awakened the family to announce that it was time to leave — some local white men were preparing to lynch him and his friend, John Hartfield. The two men slipped out of town that night; Rochelle and the five Lang children, including a nursing baby, escaped by train in the morning.

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Ms. Kirkland, with family members and her supporters from the Equal Justice Initiative, prayed at the approximate spot where John Hartfield, her father’s friend, was lynched in 1919.Credit…Andrea Morales for The New York Times

The family friend, Mr. Hartfield, eventually returned to Ellisville, and in the summer of 1919 he was accused of raping a white woman. Some townspeople set a date for his lynching, a public event that the governor of Mississippi claimed he was powerless to prevent. At an appointed time announced in The Jackson Daily News, crowds gathered near a large gum tree beside the train tracks. There Mr. Hartfield was strung up and hanged, after which his body was riddled with bullets and burned. Body parts became souvenirs.

“Could have been my father,” Ms. Kirkland said in an interview with The New York Times in 2015.

Though the Lang family had fled to East St. Louis, Ill., they still could not outrun the racist violence. In 1917, white men responded to the pressures of changing demographics and job competition by rioting in black neighborhoods, burning down homes and shooting residents. Dozens died, thousands were left homeless, and 9-year-old Mamie was seared by the memory of seeing a deaf man shot dead because he could not hear an order to halt.

The family moved again, this time to Alliance, Ohio, reflecting another aspect of the black experience: the Great Migration of the last century, when six million African-Americans left the rural South for the urban Northeast and Midwest — some seeking economic opportunity, others hoping to escape racial terrorism.

Sometimes it followed them north.

In Alliance, in the 1920s, members of the Ku Klux Klan — whose rallies were casually announced in the local press — came to the family’s home, hoods donned and torches afire, to burn a cross on their lawn. The Langs always wondered what would have happened if armed white neighbors hadn’t arrived to chase away the aggressors.

At 15, Mamie married an itinerant railroad worker named Albert Kirkland, and the couple moved to Buffalo. He found work as a grinder at the Pratt & Letchworth plant; she gave birth to nine children, six of whom reached adulthood, and immersed herself in the First Shiloh Baptist Church, of which she was a foundational member.

After her husband died in 1959, Ms. Kirkland worked as a domestic helper and babysitter before becoming a door-to-door saleswoman for Avon. She never learned to drive, and often attributed her longevity to her faith and those many years walking the Buffalo streets selling beauty products. She was still taking orders until a few weeks before her death on Dec. 28, according to her son Tarabu Betserai Kirkland.

Mr. Kirkland, her youngest child at 70, said that his mother’s experience with Avon helped her to shed her shyness and embrace her ability to connect with people. Over time, he said, she became a kind of door-to-door life coach.

“Folks didn’t want her to leave the house,” Mr. Kirkland said in a phone interview this week. “She would help them figure out ways to manage.”

But there was one place that Ms. Kirkland refused to visit: the state of her birth, where the terror of racism had scarred her childhood. She often said that she didn’t even want to see Mississippi on a map.

Her son had been nudging her to tell her life’s powerful story, and in 2015 he showed her a report by the Equal Justice Initiative called “Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror.” It included an image of an old newspaper’s headline: “John Hartfield Will Be Lynched By Ellisville Mob at 5 O’Clock This Afternoon.”

“We had never seen anything documented about John Hartfield,” Mr. Kirkland said. “For a long time we didn’t know if it was fact or fiction. But then she pointed to my laptop and said, ‘That’s him.’ And chills went up my back.”

A few months later, Ms. Kirkland returned to Ellisville with her son, who has been working on a documentary film about his mother’s journey. It was an emotional visit to a place that seemed to have erased the Hartfield lynching from memory. Ms. Kirkland took time to pray at the approximate spot where a mob had killed her father’s friend.

“She always maintained this level of grace and forgiveness,” Mr. Kirkland said. “I’m not sure I could do that.”

In addition to her son, Ms. Kirkland’s survivors include her daughters Juanita Hunter, Beatrice Kirkland, Margaret Kirkland and Jeanette Clinton.

In 2016, the Equal Justice Initiative honored Ms. Kirkland at a fund-raising gala in Manhattan. She and her son worked for weeks on her short speech, in which she planned to tell the young people in the audience that stories like hers needed to be told again and again; that stories like hers were just as important now as they were a century ago; that she should know, because she had been there.

Her speech reflected a resilient optimism; a determination to triumph over tribulation. “I left Mississippi a scared little girl of 7 years old,” Ms. Kirkland said at the event. “Now I’m 107 — and I’m not frightened anymore.”

Organizers fretted about how their guest would ascend to the stage, and they offered her a wheelchair. She declined, saying that she intended to walk on her own.

And she did.

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Mamie Lang Kirkland, Buffalo's oldest citizen, dies at 111

By Dale Anderson and Mark SommerPublished December 29, 2019|Updated December 30, 2019

 
 
 
 

Sept. 3, 1908 – Dec. 28, 2019

Buffalo’s oldest citizen has died.

Mamie Lang Kirkland was 111 years and 116 days old when she passed away Saturday in her Buffalo home.

She was the second oldest person in New York State, according to Gerontology Wiki.

"She lived a long and fruitful life, and witnessed many of the world's miraculous transitions," said a son, Tarabu Betserai Kirkland. "In her older life the world began witnessing her and her courage and strength and quiet wisdom."

Born Mamie Lang in Ellisville, Miss., about 25 miles north of Hattiesburg, Kirkland was the second of five children born to Edward and Rochelle Lang.

She maintained she died and went to heaven at age 5 after coming down with typhomalarial fever, but was revived with a tea brewed by her grandmother, a midwife and herbalist. It took her a year to learn to walk again.

Kirkland's family fled Ellisville when she was 7 after her father, a Baptist minister, and his friend were threatened with lynching. She vowed never to set foot in Mississippi again.

“My dad came home at 12:30 in the morning,” Kirkland told an interviewer from Equal Justice Initiative in 2015. “And he said, ‘Rochelle, I got to leave. Get the children together, then you leave early in the morning.’ ”

Mamie Lang Kirkland, left, at her 105th birthday party at Schiller Park Senior Center in 2013. (News file photo)

Kirkland's father told them that the friend returned several years later and was hung to death in a public lynching in Ellisville in 1919.

Kirkland's family arrived by train in East St. Louis, Ill., where they spent two years before the violent East St. Louis Race Riots of 1917. They resettled in Alliance, Ohio, where her parents ran a boarding house. They were threatened again, this time by the Ku Klux Klan, whose members burned a cross in their front yard. German neighbors fond of Mrs. Kirkland's father came to the family's defense, hoisting Lugers and rifles to ward off attackers.

She married one of the boarders, a railroad worker named Albert Kirkland, when she was 15 and they moved to Buffalo in 1924. They raised nine children.

After Kirkland's husband, a steelworker in Buffalo, died in 1959, and with only an eighth grade education, she became a sales representative for Avon. A Buffalo News story on centenarians in 2016 noted that Kirkland was still selling Avon products at age 107.

Kirkland was convinced to return to her birthplace in 2015 by her youngest son, Tarabu Betserai Kirkland, a writer and filmmaker in Los Angeles. His documentary film, “100 Years from Mississippi,” told the story of her family's flight. A New York Times reporter chronicled her visit in a front-page story.

She was honored by the Equal Justice Initiative in 2016, traveling to New York City to receive its Lynching Legacy Award.

At the ceremony, Kirkland declared, “I left Mississippi a scared little girl of 7 years old. Now I’m 107, and I’m not frightened anymore.”

She was honored again in 2018 as the oldest lynching survivor at the opening of the Legacy Museum and the Peace and Justice Memorial in Montgomery, Ala. The museum displays photographs and an oral history of her story.

She was known for her jewelry and fondness for the color purple.

Kirkland was an active member of First Shiloh Baptist Church for more than 85 years.

Retired attorney Greg Brown wasn't a blood relative, but he said Kirkland was like a "second mother" to him.

"Although she didn't have letters, she had a common sense and an ability to talk and relate to people," Brown said. "She was a very devout Christian but she wasn't just a Sunday Christian. She practiced it all the time and with people in a helping way. She was like a counselor or a mentor or helper to people. She also did this as an Avon delivery lady, where she came upon people who needed not only their beauty products but her wise counsel."

She also rarely missed a chance to vote.

Kirkland's life encompassed 20 presidents, including the first black president, something she never expected to happen in her lifetime.

“People died so I can vote. Years ago, people didn’t have a chance to vote,” Kirkland told The Buffalo News in 2014, when she was interviewed at her polling place at Canisius College. “I’m 106 and I get out to vote. The young and old should do the same, because it means a lot to everyone.”

Attorney and artist LeRoi Johnson recalled the guidance Kirkland provided when he and Tirabu Kirkland, then known as Albert Jr., were seeking to improve educational opportunities for minorities at Canisius College as freshmen in 1967. The two co-founded the Afro-American Society, and they pushed the administration to admit more minority students, add black history courses, provide a scholarship program for minority students and to offer tutorials to incoming freshmen to better prepare them for the rigors of college.

"She spoke to us about the need for doing things for others, not just for yourself, and also about the value of education," Johnson recalled. "She said to set your goals high and understand what you're doing and what you want to accomplish, and not to settle for less.

"Everything we planned at her dinner table – along with the good home-cooked food she fed us – happened," Johnson said.

Survivors include four daughters, Juanita Hunter, Beatrice Kirkland, Margaret Kirkland and Jeanette Clinton; a son, Tarabu Betserai Kirkland; and 158 grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Services will be held at 11 a.m. Friday at First Shiloh Baptist Church, 15 Pine St. Burial will be in Pine Ridge Cemetery.