Recently had the opportunity to visit The National Memorial for Peace and Justice and The Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration. The memorial recognizes lynching in the United States – more than 4,000 lynchings of African Americans – those that have been found through documentation. The statement “through documentation” means there are countless others that there are no records of – no news coverage or newspaper articles, no photos, no nothing – accounting the horrific circumstances of human beings receiving extrajudicial deadly punishment at the hands of one or more racially motivated vigilantes.
A social media post first alerted me to a 60 minutes piece on the April opening of the memorial site and museum in Montgomery, Alabama. At first glance while watching the video I thought the memorial focused solely on lynchings in that state…then it mentioned a county in South Carolina and I had to rewind! I thought “wait they have information from South Carolina?” And every other county they could find information on lynchings in the US! Very few states had no reported lynchings! WOW!!!
Immediately, I knew I had to make this journey…very soon. You see I have deep roots in South Carolina, on both sides of my family, which go back at least into the 1700s. These roots also spread to North Carolina, Virginia, Ohio, Florida and countless other yet to be discovered states where lynchings were a major part of the Jim Crow era…So I had to go!
What to expect..Emotions
Having been to the Slave Castles in Ghana and experienced a great deal of connection and sorrow I expected an emotional roller coaster in Montgomery. Walking through the memorial the weight of the horrors of lynching loomed large from the eye level rusted steel structures listing names by county in most states of this country. The memorials eventually rise above your head as you traverse the space to the accounts of the why’s – the justifications for the lynchings taking place. Some counties had one or two names inscribed large and legible from a distance, while others especially counties in Louisiana, Alabama, Oklahoma and other states had so many names listed they took up two columns of small type which at times was difficult to decipher.
Tulsa County Lynching Memorial
Being familiar with the Tulsa riots of 1921, where a mob of white men torched the Greenwood district – a predominately African-American middle class neighborhood known as “Black Wall Street” – killing thousands over a two day period, seeing the Tulsa memorial was immediately striking. The persons listed spanned two columns with dates of May 31 – June 1, 1921…Names listed as UNKNOWN! The intentional death and destruction was so horrific very few African Americans survived to account for who had been lynched. The film Rosewood chronicles much of what happened in during the massacre in Tulsa.
The creators of the memorial have made duplicates of each steel structure. This duplication is in an effort to reach out to each county where the documented lynchings took place and form a partnership with an organization within that county to have to memorial placed prominently in the county to acknowledge the county’s history and educate its residents.
Lynched for…
- …Warren Powell, 14 – “frightening” a white girl – East Point, Georgia – 1889
- …General Lee – knocking on a white woman’s front door – Reevesville, South Carolina – 1904
- …Elizabeth Lawrence – reprimanding white children who threw rocks at her – Birmingham, Alabama – 1933
- And the list of atrocities goes on…
Jim Eastman was lynched in Brunswick, Tennessee, in 1887 for not allowing a white man to beat him in a fight
Thomas Miles, Sr. was lynched in Shreveport, Louisiana, in 1912 for allegedly writing a note to a white woman.
The justifications for lynchings were unfathomable. Sans racism one would struggle to figure out and understand how anyone could justify any lynching – but racism and Jim Crow were just enough! Enough for hundreds even thousands, including families with children of all ages, to gather to watch the torture, hanging and sometimes even burning of another live human being as though to celebrate one less Black person in their community…as though that life was worthless!
Vicki R. McGill…Life In THIS skin!
Next time The Legacy Museum