The National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery AL honors the victims of lynching in the US. Each pillar represents a county where lynchings occurred and lists victims by name or as unknown.
Race based murder commonly known as lynching is a horrific yet real part of our nation’s history. For most of us, it was largely ignored at all levels of our formal education. Yet the legacy of this form of violent trauma has impacted us all as individuals and as a society whether or not we consciously recognize it. So it is a difficult and necessary step toward racial justice to face this history and the forms it continues to take in our time. Recently the stories of two teenagers brought home this to me in a powerful way.
The first teenager is Emmett Till. He was a victim of lynching in August 1955 at the age of 14. Although his story is well known in the Black community, many white people are either unfamiliar with his story or are only vaguely aware of it. That is why a current feature length movie titled “Till” is an important contribution to this painful chapter of our past. The movie focuses on the role his mother Mamie played in forcing the nation to confront the murder of her son by insisting on an open casket funeral. Although her son’s murderers were not convicted despite overwhelming evidence, she went on to be an advocate for racial justice for the rest of her life until her death in 2003. It is hard to believe, but lynching only became a federal crime in March 2022 with the passing of the Emmett Till Antilynching Act. The trailer for the movie is the first video posted below.
The second teenager is much less famous, but she still made a significant contribution to raising awareness of the history of lynching in her home area of Posey County, Indiana. Seventeen year old Sophie Kloppenburg is a young Black woman who repeatedly pushed for and finally received public commemoration for the lynching of seven Black men in her county in 1878. It was the largest lynching in Indiana history but had no public acknowledgment in or around the courthouse square where the lynchings took place. In a county that is 95% white, she persisted in bringing this history to light and its legacy that continues today. The story of her gracious persistence was featured in a recent story on CBS Sunday Morning. That story is the second video posted below.
The stories of Emmett Till and Sophie Kloppenburg remind us that confronting the pain and horror of lynching is difficult but necessary. Nothing can be healed that is not brought to consciousness. That is true for us as individuals, communities, and as a nation.