America’s lynching history is now online
Equal Justice Initiative, Google bring dark time in U.S. history to digital
SAN FRANCIS CO Two years ago, a groundbreaking study on lynching documented the brutal mob violence that forced many African Americans to flee the south.
With help from Google, the racial justice group that published the study has transformed Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror into an interactive digital platform that combines historical data and personal stories so people can explore one of the darkest passages in U.S. history.
The goal is to spark a national dialogue about a subject that is too rarely discussed yet is crucial to understanding racism today, says Bryan Stevenson, founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative and author of the best-selling book Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption.
Google.org, the Internet giant’s philanthropic arm, also announced it’s giving another $1 million to the Montgomery, Ala.-based Equal Justice Initiative to support its racial justice work. In 2015, Google.org gave $1 million to the Equal Justice Initiative to help fund a national memorial for lynching victims that the Equal Justice Initiative is building on six acres of vacant land in downtown Montgomery and a museum on the country’s racial history planned for the group’s headquarters that once was a slave warehouse.
“We want to change how we think about this era in America,” Stevenson said.
Doria Dee Johnson’s greatgreat-grandfather, Anthony Crawford, a father of 13 who started a school for black children and a successful businessman who owned 427 acres of prime cotton land in Abbeville, N.C., was lynched in 1916 after arguing with a white store owner who did not want to pay him a fair price for his cotton seed.
Johnson, an activist and Ph.D. candidate in American history at the University of Wisconsin, says the trauma of lynchings created silence. This new digital platform, with its capacity to reach millions, is helping to break it.
Visitors to the website can search a map of 4,300 lynchings in 20 states. Another map shows the seismic population shift of the Great Migration as families were forced to leave to escape racial violence. A century ago nearly all African Americans lived in the South. By 1970 most lived outside of the South, many of them in industrial cities in the North and the West.
Oral histories, and a short documentary Uprooted, told from the perspective of descendants, examine how the terror of the past lives on for generations of African-American families. A high school lesson plan brings together findings from the report with content from the digital platform to show how lynchings enforced decades of racial segregation.
“I just know that we have to keep remembering, to keep telling the story,” Tarabu Betserai Kirkland recounts during one of the oral histories.
His 109-year-old mother and her family had to leave their home in Mississippi in 1915 when she was 7 because of a lynching threat, only to be terrorized by race riots and white vigilantes in Illinois and being chased out of Ohio by klansmen who burned a cross on their lawn as she hid under the bed. A family friend, John Hartfield, who decided to return to Mississippi, was hung and shot before his body was burned before a mob of 10,000 in 1919.
“How do you get through that if you don’t confront history?” Kirkland said.
For five years, the Equal Justice Initiative combed through accounts in local newspapers, court records and historical archives and conducted interviews with survivors and descendants of victims to identify every lynching that took place in 20 states, uncovering some 800 more than previously found. The study is part of the Equal Justice Initiative’s push to trace the roots of racial inequality in the U.S. from slavery to mass incarceration.
Stevenson says today’s police shootings of unarmed AfricanAmerican men and the mass incarceration of black people are a legacy of slavery and lynching. Black people are seen through a lens of racial difference that presumes their guilt, resulting in wrongful arrests, convictions and death sentences, he says.
“I think our history has created a kind of smog that we all breathe in. We don’t even talk about the fact that we are living in a polluted environment that has been corrupted by this history of all kinds of racial inequality,” Stevenson says.
More than a century ago, Shirah Dedman’s great-grandfather, Thomas Miles, a black business owner in Shreveport, La., acquitted by a judge of writing letters to a white woman, was grabbed outside the courthouse by an angry mob and killed. Fear drove his family to Los Angeles.
Dedman and her family’s journey back to Louisiana, for the first time since her great-grandfather was lynched there, is the subject of Uprooted, a six-minute documentary film on the website.
A filmmaker in California, Dedman says her mother first told her how her great-grandfather died when Dedman was working on a family tree project in the third grade. Her family has no photographs of him, only a quarter-inch-thick report from the Equal Justice Initiative on how in 1912 he was strung up, strangled and shot. Her grandfather was 6 at the time.
“I am really hoping that sharing my family’s story will help,” Dedman says. “The only way we are going to heal as a people and as a nation is to confront what has happened to us.”
In January, as a Google film crew trailed them, Dedman walked in her great-grandfather’s footsteps with her mother and aunt, from the empty, overgrown lot where his home once stood to the spot on main street where he ran a small business to the old tree in a lonely field off a busy highway where he was hung. Dedman says as she approached the tree, her chest felt heavy and she couldn’t catch her breath.
“Nobody knows what he looks like. But I could still see him,” she says. “You can imagine this man being hoisted up and knowing he’s losing his life and that he has a baby and a wife at home.”
Dedman wrapped her arms around the tree trunk. Her mother and aunt filled two glass jars with soil, one for the family to keep, the other for a national memorial. The jars are labeled with the names of the victims, the location of the lynchings and the dates of their deaths.
Dedman says as she looked at the spot where her family once lived, tears filled her eyes, but her mother was smiling. “It looked like you were home,” she told her mother afterward. Her mother said, “I felt like I was home.”
“I think our history has created a kind of smog that we all breathe in.” Bryan Stevenson