Unknowable Truths

In The Evidence of Things Not Seen, written by James Baldwin in 1985, Baldwin writes about the murder of at least 21 Black children in Atlanta between 1979–1980:

Bring out your dead:
Edward Hope Smith, 14. Reported missing July 20, 1979. Found dead on July 28 of gunshot wounds along a road in a wooded area.

Bring out your dead:
Alfred James Evans, 13. Last seen July 25, 1979, waiting to catch a bus. Police identified Evans’s body October 13, 1980, after it was found July 28 near the body of Edward Hope Smith. Strangulation.

Bring out your dead:
Milton Harvey, 14. Last seen September 1979. Found dead November 1979. Cause of death: undetermined.

Bring out your dead.

…

In 2015, scholar Grace Kyungwon Hong writes in her book Death Beyond Disavowal: The Impossible Politics of Difference invoking Baldwin’s call to bring out your dead. She lists a number of Black feminists who died premature deaths. “Barbara Christian 2000. June Jordan in 2002. Sherley Anne Williams in 1999. Toni Cade Bambara in 1995. Audre Lorde in 1992. Beverly Robinson in 2002. Endesha Ida Mae Holland in 2006. Claudia Tate in 2002. Nellie McKay in 2006. VèVè Clark in 2007. Toni Yancey in 2013. Stephanie Camp in 2014.”

Hong goes onto say “To bring out your dead is to remember what must be forgotten, to find the ‘evidence of things not seen:’ that the notion of American equality in the…