EDITORIAL ROUNDUP

March 20 Valdosta (Ga.) Daily Times Cold cases should be reopened

Georgia lynchings — long ignored — should be investigated and prosecuted. Period.

Mobs lynched Black people, including our own Mary Turner, with impunity.

Though many of the killers have long since died, the families of Black people across the state of Georgia still deserve justice.

State Rep. Carl Gilliard’s Georgia Cold Case Project to Address Historic Lynchings is more than symbolic. His measure is all about social justice and it is simply the right thing to do.

Following the brutal murder of Ahmaud Arbery, our state has been moving in the right direction by abolishing Jim Crowera citizen’s arrest laws and enacting hate crime legislation, but we still have a long way to go.

Ignoring history does not erase the atrocities of the past.

More than 500 lynchings in Georgia’s past have gone unprosecuted.

Not only is that unacceptable, it is unconscionable.

These are wrongs that must be righted. In many cases, the lynchings were very public and the public knew who the murderers were.

Rep. Gilliard and his family understand these travesties of justice all too well. His own brother was lynched and mutilated in 1957, years before the state representative was born.

In light of his own family’s history, Gilliard’s words are poignant when he says, “Georgia has a past and we’ve got to do something to give these people what they deserve. We may not get every last case out of the 500 some odd cases that we know of, but if we get one more than we’ve had, we’re moving in the right direction.”

The lynching of Mary Turner at the Lowndes-Brooks County line in 1918 was among the most brutal lynchings in American history but far from being an isolated event in Georgia history.

According to the Equal Justice Initiative, Georgia ranks second in the highest amount of reported lynchings, 593 between 1877-1950.

In addition to Turner, in Lowndes County alone, four lynchings — Will Lowe in 1890, David Goosby I in 1894, Caesar Sheffield in 1915, (unknown) Lewis in 1916 — have been documented. In Thomas County, eight lynchings and in Tift County, the lynchings of Ed Henderson in 1899, two unknown people on Jan. 29, 1900, and Charles Lokie in 1908, have been documented. Seven lynchings were reported in Colquitt County.

Given South Georgia’s past, our legislative delegation should be at the forefront of supporting Gilliard’s bill.

Not only would this piece of legislation reopen cold cases and provide the mechanisms making it possible to prosecute those guilty of lynchings, it would also exonerate lynching victims wrongly accused of crimes.

The legislation will not change the past but it acknowledges injustice and is simply the right thing to do.