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Washington Post

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Raleigh Charter - TIME

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Confederate Monuments and Other Disputed Memorials Have Come Down in Cities Across America. What Should Take Their Place?

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Monument bases in dozens of cities now stand vacant. What, if anything, should fill those empty spaces? Here's what the experts think

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If school integration in the South were to continue at its 1959 rate, it would take four thousand years for all Southern Negro children to achieve their right to equal educational opportunity. Between 1954-when the Supreme Court ruled that such equal opportunity was in fact guaranteed them by the Constitution-and 1958, a total of 376,000 Southern Negro schoolchildren were enrolled in integrated schools, and almost all of these were in the border states. In 1959, the total of 376,000 went up by only 511 additional children-despite the desegregation of 87 more school districts. To date, counting the progress initially made in the border states, only 6 per cent of the South's Negro schoolchildren are attending integrated schools-and further progress has now been slowed to a trickle.

In its efforts to circumvent the Supreme Court's ruling and prevent or retard integration, the South has tried many approaches: school-closing laws, "interposition," scholarship aid for those parents who preferred to send their children to all-white schools, anti-NAACP laws, economic reprisal, intimidation, and violence. But only one technique-the pupil placement law-has met with substantial success in the courts. The technique is now clearly emerging as the South's major weapon in maintaining school segregation.

The placement laws are designed to perpetuate segregation by integrating the fewest possible number of Negro students whenever federal action forces the issue. The first law was enacted by North Carolina on March 30, 1955, and refined by amendments the following year. Virginia passed the second placement law on September 29, 1956. And in 1957, after the North Carolina law had withstood a major court challenge, the other Southern states rushed to get on the bandwagon. At this writing, the states of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia, and the city of Atlanta, Georgia, have all adopted placement laws, and it appears that other states and cities will follow suit.

The clear intention of non-compliance and defiance is being revealed in the hardcore Southern states; there the pupil placement laws are an actual and potential tool of great efficacy. In Arkansas, Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida, only about 500 Negro students out of a total of 800,000 have been integrated-a tiny fraction of one per cent. But even more significantly, in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina, of a combined total of 1,400,000 Negro students, none have been integrated; nor do the leaders of any of these states intend to integrate a single school. Because the constitutionality of the placement laws has been upheld, it is thus almost certain that no additional major integration-comparable, say, to that which occurred during the first several years after the Supreme Court ruling-can now take place for at least a number of years. These facts no doubt deepen Negro unrest; but they also pose for the nation as a whole the question of whether it seriously intends to assist the Negroes in securing the rights they thought they had won in 1954.

The specific provisions and requirements of the placement laws vary widely from state to state, but the purpose is the same everywhere: the establishment of machinery that will control the school assignment of pupils in such a way as to prevent Negro children from transferring to white schools, or that will limit such transfers, whenever total segregation becomes untenable, to a token number. Theoretically, the laws apply to the placement of all pupils, black and white, in all schools; but actually, intended as tools of racial discrimination, they are not invoked until a Negro pupil applies for a transfer to a white school. The board of that particular white school receives the application, and within a month or two renders its decision-which, in almost every case, refuses the request on the grounds that the applicant does not meet the criteria specified by the local placement law. These criteria are extremely diverse in degree of vagueness and subjectivity; and none refers overtly to race. Ranging from psychological to economic considerations, they include : the psychological qualification of the pupil for both the instruction and the milieu of the white school; the effects of the pupil's admission upon the academic progress of other students; the effect of the admission upon prevailing academic standards; the suitability of established curricula for particular pupils; the psychological effect on the pupil of attendance at the school; the adequacy of a pupil's preparation; the possibility of breaches of the peace or ill will or economic retaliation within the community; the possibility or threat of friction or disorder among the pupils or other persons involved; "sociological and psychological factors as will prevent any condition of socioeconomic class consciousness among pupils attending any given school"; and, finally, "other relevant matters."

To oppose the school board's decision, an applicant must utilize the machinery for administrative appeal provided by most of the placement laws. Several months are usually needed to exhaust all these possibilities; thus, in most cases, a child is kept from attending the white school for the year he had applied simply by default. When the final administrative decision is at last made, it too is most often negative. But only after this decision can the applicant turn to the courts. There he must prove that the authorities have applied the placement criteria illegally-he must prove, in other words, that he was excluded from a particular school because of his race. More time is consumed in filing a complaint, waiting for the date of the hearing, and then waiting again (approximately six weeks) for the judge's decision. Dilatory motions, frequently employed by school authorities, can consume as much as six or seven months. If the judge finds that the applicant has failed to prove discrimination, he must then appeal to a higher court. On such appeals, the final verdict-which, of course, may not grant the transfer-can take two or three years.

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Several actual cases will illustrate the difficulties, the expenditures of money and time, that are involved in applying for transfer under the current placement laws. Last summer, in Durham, North Carolina, the parents of 160 Negro children applied for transfers for them (a large number of these applicants were secured through the ceaseless and courageous efforts of the local NAACP). The school board found that, according to the placement laws, none of the applicants qualified. The parents appealed the decisions with the help of an NAACP Legal and Educational Defense Fund lawyer. The school board granted a hearing in October, after the school year had begun. Not all the parents-about half their number-were able to attend on the night of the hearing, and each parent who did attend was interrogated. The board subsequently announced that the children of all those parents who failed to appear were automatically disqualified. However, it also rejected the applications of all the children whose parents were there, for, said the board, not one pupil met the criteria of the law.

Up to 1959, Virginia's state placement board had passed on 500,000 pupil enrollments without finding a single Negro student who qualified for a transfer to a white school. When, in 1959, an incredulous federal judge in Norfolk threatened the board with a contempt action, the board gravely went over its files and finally found four Negroes in Norfolk who qualified; the court was satisfied. This year, 1960, the board approved the transfers of another sixteen Negro students among school systems in three Virginia communities, two of which had already been desegregated by court order.

Records of pupil placement actions in Alexandria, Virginia, produced in connection with a parents' suit, reveal the detailed workings of placement laws. If an applicant's IQ was below the norm for his age, he was turned down on the grounds that the work in the white school would be too difficult for him. But if the applicant's IQ was above the average for his age, he was also turned down-because he would be "happier" in the "position of outstanding leadership" that he enjoyed in the lower-norm Negro school. If, finally, the applicant's IQ was normal for his age, other grounds for exclusion were adduced. In Case Number 4 in the series, for example, where the mental age of the applicant was found to be commensurate with his chronological age, the ruling stated:

He [the applicant] lives at the west intersection of North Columbus Street and Powhatan Street-geographically he is equidistant from Houston [the Negro school] and Ficklin [the white school]. It is estimated that the actual distances which have to be walked, because of the way the streets run, the distance to Houston is somewhat shorter [ sic] .

For this reason, the applicant was denied admission to Ficklin school.

The Little Rock school board, which began its third year of integrated classes this year, has placed thirteen Negro students in Central and Hall High Schools-four more than when the schools were integrated three years ago. (As a matter of fact, the number had dropped to seven in 1959.) In June 1960 the board had 74 Negro reassignment applications for the fall 1960 semester. The board has already announced that it did not plan to permit any desegregation on the junior-high level, which of course means that it does not intend to discover any qualified applicants among those seeking entrance at that level. At this writing, the board has reviewed and rejected 39 of the 74 transfer applications.

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Marion A. Wright, vice president of the Southern Regional Council, has called pupil placement laws "legalistic horseplay" to keep Negro children out of white schools. The NAACP regards many features of the laws as unconstitutional, and maintains further that in theory and practice they place unwarranted and usually insuperable burdens on the average Negro child seeking the educational equality supposedly guaranteed to him by both the Constitution and the 1954 Supreme Court ruling. With this view many legal experts agree, and in fact, the success of the laws in the courts has aroused considerable astonishment among the experts. In 1957 a suit was brought by a group of North Carolina parents asking that their children not be required to go through the procedures of the state's pupil placement law to secure educational equality. The Fourth Circuit Court ruled against them, and the Supreme Court affirmed the decision. A second major test occurred in 1958 when a suit testing Alabama's pupil placement law came before the Supreme Court. The Court, in a one-sentence opinion, upheld the Fifth Circuit's ruling that the provisions of the law were in themselves constitutional. (The Fifth Circuit has also found Arkansas' law constitutional on its face.) In 1959 the Supreme Court denied another North Carolina suit which also sought to gain admission for a Negro child to a white school without resorting to full procedure of the placement law. And in a third North Carolina case, the Supreme Court upheld the Fourth Circuit's ruling that because Montgomery County, North Carolina, was operating under a pupil placement law, it did not have to devise a general desegregation plan.

The Supreme Court's upholding of the Alabama pupil placement law was profoundly disillusioning to many Southern Negroes. To begin with, placement laws from their inception had prevented "class action" suits. The cases that resulted in the 1954 Supreme Court ruling were "class actions"-that is, the Court's decision became a binding rule for all cases. But under pupil placement laws, each individual aspirant for educational equality is on his own, and is pitted against all the power and pressure that the community and state can bring against him. Even if he finally wins in court, the next applicant faces the same hurdles and barriers. The Supreme Court's decision affirmed this state of affairs.

Lawyers and civil rights experts believed that the decision also had expressed or implied the following:

1. That all applicants must complete the full administrative procedures specified by such laws before seeking relief in the courts;

2. That as far as the Supreme Court is concerned, pupil placement laws constitute a statewide or community-wide integration program; and, finally,

3. That the courts would not require general desegregation programs where pupil placement laws were in force.

In practice, the constellation of both legal and social power arrayed against the individual Negro pupil and his family prevents most from even applying. Many of those communities in which pupil placement laws are in effect stand ready to apply the severest economic pressures against any Negro parents who file applications on behalf of their children. Moreover, children who win in court face, at best, cool receptions when they come to school-in the lower grades especially-and even the most courageous Negro parents hesitate to visit such a situation upon their children. Thus, it is often difficult for Negro leadership to get any parents to file applications. And to further diminish their number, when the NAACP does make an organized attempt to secure at least token integration, it fights primarily for those applications which indicate the most promise of establishing the discriminatory intention of the laws.

Among the effects within the Southern Negro community of the placement laws and the ensuing various court decisions has been a reaction against the old liberal-legal approach to securing civil rights which has dominated its thinking for a generation. The NAACP, the champion of this approach, accordingly has lost stature in the eyes of many Negroes. Actually, of course, one of the purposes of the placement laws has been to "break the NAACP's back" by imposing an impossible burden of litigation as the price for even modest progress in school integration. It was the NAACP's long and relentless legal pressure in the first place, after the 1954 Supreme Court ruling, that brought the various placement laws into being; and now the NAACP is making use of every legal means to weaken these laws and ultimately destroy their effectiveness. But meanwhile, the pupil placement roadblock remains substantially effective, and Negro unrest has grown rapidly. It hardly seems too much to say that the lunch counter sit-ins were engendered by the legal experts who wrote the South's pupil placement laws.

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In some instances, though, the Circuit Courts are already beginning to take a closer look at the pupil placement laws. Several recent court rulings suggest that the wall created by the Supreme Court's favorable 1958 decision on the Alabama statute may not be impenetrable. In 1959, the Fifth Circuit, in a Florida case, held that pupil placement laws did not automatically relieve local school boards from the obligation of beginning a "reasonable start toward full compliance" with the 1954 school decision. In another Florida case this year, the court also ruled that pupil placement criteria must be applied to all students in order to be constitutional-not just to Negro pupils seeking transfer to white schools. In another 1960 case in the Fourth Circuit, the court held that Negroes need not necessarily exhaust administrative procedures under pupil placement laws to seek a decree for a positive desegregation program. In Alexandria, Virginia, the Fourth Circuit warned against the application of the pupil placement criteria solely to Negroes seeking transfer, and further warned against use of the laws to perpetuate separate white and Negro school districts. Thus, these recent rulings suggest conflicts of fact and interpretation which may ultimately result in Supreme Court decisions of broadly applicable rules of law.

Yet meanwhile, the placement laws remain in force with court blessing. Six years after the Supreme Court ruled that segregated schools violate the Constitution, the Negro who wants equality of educational opportunity for his child often stands substantially alone. In the next few years, as the intention of full defiance or token compliance becomes the clear position of the hard-core South, the nation will find itself coming closer to a genuine decision on whether or not it really intends the Supreme Court's ruling of 1954 to become the law of the land. The effect of the pupil placement laws is to focus and sharpen this decision.

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The South's Pupil Placement Laws:Newest Weapon Against Integration - Ralph Lee Smith, Commentary Magazine

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If school integration in the South were to continue at its 1959 rate, it would take four thousand years for all Southern Negro children to achieve their right to equal educational opportunity.

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When white supremacists overthrew a government

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George Edwin Taylor - Wisconsin Raised by Nate Smith brought up from the South - Nate Smith came with Governor Washington

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George Edwin Taylor - Wisconsin Raised by Nate Smith brought up from the South - Nate Smith came with Governor Washington

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Mary Turner pregnant woman lynched in Georgia May 1918

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Mary Turner pregnant woman lynched in Georgia May 1918

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In Lowndes County, Georgia, by the side of State Road 122, stands a historical marker for "Mary Turner and the Lynching Rampage of 1918." The metal marker describes in plain language a May 1918 spree of mob violence. After a white farmer was murdered, the mob killed at least 11 African Americans.

Mary Turner, the marker's named victim, was eight months pregnant. The mob targeted her because she spoke out against the lynching of her husband Hayes. A crowd of several hundred watched the men hang, burn, and shoot Turner, then cut out her fetus and stomp it into the ground.

From 1998 to 2011, I researched and wrote a book about Mary Turner's lynching. I examined the responses of activists, artists, writers, and local residents to this appalling act. Turner's story has had a long, complex afterlife: a tangled mixture of shock, outrage, grief, shame, and, too often, silence. The ways we remember, forget, and erase the history of this lynching is an inescapable part of its story: Even the monument to Mary Turner's death contains bullet holes from a Winchester .270, normally used for killing deer.

The horror of Turner's lynching did not stay secret. During the late 1910s and early 1920s, the incident galvanized anti-lynching protest around the country. Writers and artists including Angelina Weld Grimké, Meta Warrick Fuller, Anne Spencer, and Jean Toomer saw the lynching as an example of how racial violence traumatizes individuals, families, and communities. Organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Commission on Interracial Cooperation (CIC) used Turner's death in magazine exposés and informational pamphlets as evidence that lynching was less about punishment for black male criminality and more about the public performance of white supremacy.

The Anti-Lynching Crusaders, arguing that lynching was an attack on women as well as men, featured Turner as the centerpiece of a campaign to support federal legislation against mob violence. The Crusaders raised money and awareness for the 1922 Dyer Bill, sponsored by Leonidas C. Dyer, a Republican Representative from Missouri, which proposed to make lynching a felony. The bill passed the House but stalled in the Senate when Southern Democrats threatened a filibuster. Although Turner's lynching was barbaric, more conventional excuses for mob violence-what Ida B. Wells called the "rape myth"-remained intractable.

In time Turner's name became a historical footnote, as stories like those of the Scottsboro Boys, in 1931, and Emmett Till, in 1955, dominated headlines.

It was not until the late 20th century that writers and artists began to recover Turner as an example of how mainstream history marginalizes black women. The title of Freida High Tesfagiorgis's 1985 painting about Turner, "Hidden Memories," captures the sense of erasure that many others find in her story.

Since then, author Honorée Fanonne Jeffers has published short fiction and poetry about Turner, most notably the poem "dirty south moon" in her 2007 volume Red Clay Suite. Playwright Lekethia Dalcoe's depiction of the incident, A Small Oak Tree Runs Red, was produced in Chicago (2016) and New York (2018). This February, artist Rachel Marie-Crane Williams brought original images from her graphic narrative in progress, Mary Turner and the Lynching Rampage, to Valdosta State University (VSU)-about 20 miles from where Turner died-for a monthlong display.

For some locals, however, Turner's story remains taboo-and an open wound. The "Lynching Rampage of 1918" occurred during a single week in mid-May and was spread out over two Georgia counties-Brooks and Lowndes. 11 victims were confirmed. Other bodies of African-American males were found but not identified, and others disappeared, never to be heard from again.

Walter White, who investigated the lynchings for the NAACP, publicly named 16 local mob ringleaders, but in fact a large swath of the population likely saw or took part in the events. Hundreds-from Brooks, Lowndes, and surrounding counties-witnessed Mary Turner's murder, as well as those of Will Head and Will Thompson, two men accused of complicity in the death of the white farmer Hampton Smith. Hayes Turner's body hung on a main road, just outside the town of Quitman, for a day before it was cut down. When Sidney Johnson, who killed Smith during a wage dispute, was finally captured and shot, the mob dragged his body the 20-plus miles from Valdosta to the small town of Barney, near the site of the present-day historical marker. How many people watched this terrible parade is unclear.

There is no question that the week's violence affected victims, families, perpetrators, witnesses-and their descendants. Yet when I began researching Mary Turner and the Memory of Lynching in 1998, records were almost impossible to locate. People rarely, if ever, spoke publicly about what happened. Keepers of official civic memory claimed a history of positive race relations, even though Georgia had the second-highest rate of lynchings nationally (following Mississippi). Brooks and Lowndes Counties, because of the 1918 incident, had some of state's highest numbers.

In the early 2000s, the Mary Turner Project, a small but dedicated group based out of Valdosta State, spearheaded a coalition to erect the historical marker, hoping to end the silence. The marker went up in 2010. Within a year, someone shot a bullet right through its middle.

The approaching 100th anniversary of "Lynching Rampage of 1918" prompts me to consider what I have learned since writing about Mary Turner.

And so much of my knowledge rides on that bullet.

My son found the casing. He was 10 at the time, an eagle-eyed hunter of lizards and bugs. We drove up from our Florida home via I-75, took Exit 29 to Highway 122 heading west, and pulled onto the gravel embankment of the Little River. The book had just come out, and I wanted to make peace with an emotionally difficult project that I had carried around for more than a decade.

I already had heard about the bullet hole. A graduate student passing through for a conference had put a flower in it and snapped a picture, to show me. When the marker went up, the area was nicely landscaped with perennials and mulch. By the time I visited, the flowers were dead. I poked my finger through the bullet hole; my son wandered around in the weeds that were taking over. "Hey Mom," he said, holding up the casing. "Is this what you're looking for?

Since then, the marker has been shot at least three more times.

Other historical markers for racial violence have met similar fates. In Florida, the marker depicting the 1923 Rosewood massacre has been repaired multiple times. On my last visit several years ago, chunks were blown out of its protective concrete frame. In 2017, two different Mississippi markers for the 1955 Emmett Till murder were defaced-one by bullets, another by a blunt object. The marker for the 1964 murders of Mississippi Freedom Summer workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner was vandalized multiple times and eventually stolen.

Some people actively try to destroy the past. Some erase more passively, waiting for amnesia's weeds to take over.

Others refuse to let memory die. For the scholars, filmmakers, artists, and writers who continue producing work about Mary Turner, she symbolizes a double injustice. On one level is her brutal death. On another is the way that she ebbs and flows from historical memory.

One might see artist and activist response to Turner as a forerunner of the recent Say Her Name campaign, which attempts to make sure that women are included in public discussions of violence. Decades before the social media hashtag #SayHerName, Mary Talbert's band of Anti-Lynching Crusaders circulated pamphlets featuring Turner's story, trying to move women from the margins to the center of a male-dominated narrative.

Turner's lynching, although gruesome and shocking, was hardly an isolated incident. While statistics vary, a recent attempt by the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) to quantify racial violence in the American South documented 4,075 lynchings between 1877 and 1950. The EJI's report does not separate victims by gender, but University of North Carolina Wilmington criminologist David Victor Baker has confirmed there were 179 female victims. At least three pregnant women other than Turner were lynched. These numbers may be small, but they are significant.

The temptation, when reading stories such as Turner's, is to think, "down there, back then, not me." But that impulse is really the desire to silence: the need to place protective distance between our ideal selves and the reality that anyone can be witness, victim, or perpetrator.

Attacking pregnant women has a long and telling history. The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies documents multiple occurrences-from the Holocaust to more recent incidents in Bosnia, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)-of perpetrators singling out pregnant women for torture, mutilation, and removal of fetuses. The practice goes back to Biblical times. The book of Amos mentions God punishing Ammonites for cutting open pregnant women in Gilead during a border war. An Assyrian poem from c. 1100 B.C. glorifies a military battle where the victor "slits the wombs of pregnant women."

Looking at Mary Turner within this long, international context reminds us that such violence can take place anytime, anywhere. The sudden ease with which a community can become a mob, or a society can degrade into political violence, is a frightening but sad fact of our shared humanity.

Shooting a hole in a marker does not change the history of Brooks and Lowndes Counties, or the long history of humanity either. Only by confronting-as individuals, communities, and societies-the truth of how we came to be the way we are today, can we make the world better for ourselves and for our children.

My son agrees. As our family drove away from the "Lynching Rampage of 1918," he told me he hoped the shooter would one day feel remorse and try to make amends.

He said, "You don't have to like the marker, but you should respect it."

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A Hundred Years After Her Lynching, Mary Turner's Memorial Remains a Battleground | Essay | Zócalo Public Square

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In Lowndes County, Georgia, by the side of State Road 122, stands a historical marker for "Mary Turner and the Lynching Rampage of 1918." The metal marker describes in plain language a May 1918 spree of mob violence. After a white farmer was murdered, the mob killed at least 11 African Americans.

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African American leader - ran for President WISCONSIN

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Taylor was born in Little Rock, Arkansas, in August 1857, to Amanda Hines, a free African American woman. Taylor later reported that his father was Nathan Taylor, a slave. Hines was forced to leave Arkansas in 1859 as a consequence of a new law that required all free African Americans to leave the state by January 1, 1860, or be sold as slaves. Hines died in Alton, Illinois, in 1861 or 1862, and young George was forced to live in "dry goods boxes" and fend for himself until 1865 when he arrived in La Crosse, Wisconsin, aboard the "Hawkeye State," a side-paddle vessel operating on the upper Mississippi River. Taylor lived in La Crosse only one or two years, after which he was "bound out" to Nathan Smith of rural West Salem where he lived until he reached the age of 20 years. He attended Wayland University in Beaver Dam from 1877 to 1879, after which he settled in La Crosse and in the employ of Marcus "Brick" Pomeroy, editor of Pomeroy's Democrat. From 1880 to 1885, Taylor wrote for several local papers and contributed articles to the Chicago Inter Ocean. In 1885, he was the editor of a newspaper supported financially by Frank "White Beaver" Powell, and eventually became an important player in Powell's first two terms as mayor of La Crosse. In 1886 and 1887, Taylor became a crucial figure and office holder in Wisconsin's People's Party and then its Union Labor Party. His Wisconsin Labor Advocate was the voice of Wisconsin's Labor Party in 1886-1887. From 1891 to 1910, Taylor lived in Oskaloosa and Ottumwa, Iowa, where he published a national magazine called the Negro Solicitor. During this period, he rose to prominence in national African American politics, acting as president of the National Colored Men's Protective Association and the National Negro Democratic League and served high office in various other African American organizations. In 1904, Taylor was selected to lead the ticket of the National Negro Liberty Party for the office of President of the United States. From 1910 to 1925, Taylor retreated from the national stage and lived an active life in Jacksonville, Florida.

(Image from Richmond Planet (Richmond, VA), October 14, 1899, p.8)

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Library Guides: George Edwin Taylor: About

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Taylor was born in Little Rock, Arkansas, in August 1857, to Amanda Hines, a free African American woman. Taylor later reported that his father was Nathan Taylor, a slave. Hines was forced to leave Arkansas in 1859 as a consequence of a new law that required all free African Americans to leave the state by January 1, 1860, or be sold as slaves.

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George Taylor Boxer 1880-1887 NY, NJ - Connection?

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George Taylor Boxer 1880-1887 NY, NJ - Connection?

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George Taylor

HEIGHT 5-7

WEIGHT 135 lbs

Taylor was quick and shifty and a willing, game fighter; His punches were sharp; Little is known about him except for some descriptions in his recorded bouts

1880 Mar 20 Jimmy Kelly New York, NY EX Nov 24 Jimmy Kelly Bridgeport, Ct EX 3 Nov 25 Jimmy Kelly New York, NY EX 3 Dec 13 Jimmy Kelly New York, NY EX Dec 18 Jimmy Kelly New York, NY EX 3 Dec 23 Jimmy Kelly New York, NY EX 3 Dec Jimmy Kelly New York, NY EX 4 1881 Jan Jimmy Kelly New York, NY EX Feb 10 Jimmy Kelly New York, NY EX 3 Feb 17 Jimmy Kelly New York, NY LK 18 1882 Jan 1883 Feb 15 Jersey City, NJ EX 3 Feb 17 New York, NY W 3 Jun 26 May 28 Jimmy Murray New York, NY EX Mar 27 Young English New York, NY EX Mar 28 Young English Jersey City, NJ EX May 11 Young English Boston, Ma EX 3 Nov 10Jimmy Murray New York, NY EX -Some sources report 11/10/83 Nov 16Jimmy Murray New York, NY EX Nov 27 Ed Connors New York, NY EX Dec 20Jimmy Murray New York, NY EXBlack Diamond (Harry Woodson) Mar 13 Pat Jordan New York, NY EX 3 Apr 12 Charles Conley Brooklyn, NY EX 3 -Some sources report "Long Island City, NY" Jun 24 near Brooklyn, NY ND Sep 20Black Diamond (Harry Woodson) New York, NY EX New York, NY ND Oct Young Martin New York, NY EX Oct 23 Jack Davis Oakland, Pa KO 3 Dec 13Joe Fowler New York, NY EX 1884 Mar 13 Young Martin Newark, NJ EX Mar 15Black Diamond (Harry Woodson) Charlie Norton Boston, Ma D 4 1886 Jan 15 New York, NY EX Nov 2 Jimmy Connors Philadelphia, Pa SCH -This bout was scheduled; The outcome is not known 1887Joe Fowler Robert "Cocky" Turnbull New York, NY EX Jul 5 Jim Barry New York, NY EX -This bout was postponed from 7/04/84 due to rain Jul Thomas "Soap" McAlpine New York, NY EX -This bout was held during Jul-Aug 1884; Some sources report 2/08/84 Oct 2 Mike Mulligan New York, NY EX 4 Oct 6 Ed Connors New York, NY EX 3 Oct 23 Frank King New York, NY EX Nov 10 Pat McCausland New York, NY EX 3 Dec 6George Godfrey Billy Dacey Billy Dacey New York, NY EX 3

Review courtesy of Tracy Callis, Historian, International Boxing Research Organization

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HEIGHT 5-7 WEIGHT 135 lbs Taylor was quick and shifty and a willing, game fighter; His punches were sharp; Little is known about him except for some descriptions in his recorded bouts 1880 Mar 20 Jimmy Kelly New York, NY EX Nov 24 Jimmy Kelly Bridgeport, Ct EX 3 Nov

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Winston Salem 5 lynched mob riot Nov 1918, Gov. Bickett "investigates"

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Winston Salem 5 lynched mob riot Nov 1918, Gov. Bickett "investigates"

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"We were much too frightened to make any outcry," she said. "The negro forced us to leave the road and move back along the footpath running along the railroad.... Then he shot my husband twice."

The assailant, she said, then brought her further along the footpath.

From the Journal: "Chief Thomas asked her if she had been offered any violence. Her answer was: 'Yes.'

"Sheriff Flynt then asked if he had accomplished his purpose, and her answer again was: 'Yes!'"

This is how rapes were described in newsprint in 1918: just the barest suggestion, but everybody knew what it meant.

"He walked away in the direction of town, after telling me that if I said anything my character would be ruined," she elaborated, adding that the man had also stolen $2.25 from her.

Mr. JS Pulliam, proprietor of the store, and a few other townsfolk found Jim Childress crawling towards the road, shot in the head and torso.

Forsyth County Sheriff George Flynt and Winston-Salem Police Chief JA Thomas collaborated on a manhunt. The two lawmen found "three negroes, a woman and two men," near the Mengle Box Co. on the tracks, and gave chase when they separated and ran. Sheriff Flynt took after one of the men, and reported exchanging gunfire. Flynt took a bullet to the hand, "between the knuckles of the middle and third finger," according to the Journal, and sustained a wound to the neck. The assailant made off.

"The sheriff says he feels certain that he was the man wanted."

The day the story broke, Chief Thomas arrested Russell High on Fourth Street. High was black, he had just ridden into town from Durham and he had a gun in his possession. Thomas took him to the Childress home so Cora could identify him from the porch as a thin scattering of neighbors and onlookers drew near.

It is now understood that Thomas asked Cora if she had gotten a good look at High, and she nodded yes before they retreated inside the house, where Cora told Thomas that High did not match the description of her assailant. But all the crowd saw was the nod, and word began to spread.

By the time Thomas brought High back to the town jail - no reason for this was given in the contemporaneous accounts- it was too late.

Thomas and High got back to the jail around noon; shortly afterward men from the Inverness Mill neighborhood began to gather. By 4 p.m. there were a few hundred. By 6 p.m. on that autumn evening, there were a few thousand. They wanted High. Thomas refused to surrender him.

The standoff continued as each side bolstered their ranks. Thomas had called in the Home Guard -a city militia made up of men too old or infirm to fight overseas - and stood them with bayoneted rifles inside town hall. He also had the police and fire departments on hand. He introduced speakers such as Mayor Robert Gorrell, who implored with the throng that they were after the wrong man, arguments buttressed by Mr. WM Hendren, Mr. PH Hanes Sr., Mr. HG Chatham, reverends HA Brown and WL Hutchins, and even Cora Childress herself, who insisted that she had never seen High before that day.

It changed nothing.

The mob surged towards the building and an unknown number actually got inside to confront High locked in his cell. The jailer would not relinquish the keys. Three shots rang out, one of them finding a member of the mob; in the confusion the Home Guard cleared the building as unrest grew outside.

At 6 p.m., it is generally agreed, the standoff broke for good.

That's when they turned the fire hoses on the crowd, pushing them back from the entrance to the hall. That's when the gunshots started to ring out in earnest, when pandemonium descended on the corner of Fourth and Main streets as bullets, bricks and bodies flew everywhere. And that's when it started to rain, throwing a veil of confusion over the scene.

"Two white people are dead," reads the lede of the page 1 sidebar in the next day's Journal. The piece describes the looting of the Hege hardware store of guns and ammunition by "mostly very young boys." The Journal reported, "[B]y a seemingly unanimous impulse, they set out in search of other stores."

They cleared out Walle-Huske of weaponry, then took guns and knives at Dalton Brothers on Trade Street. Mr. Roberts, of Robert's hardware, reportedly told the would-be plunderers: "Boys you will get me, but the first one to come in at that door will get shot." There were no takers.

The Journal further described the mob as boys between 14 and 18 years of age. "[M]any of them were still in short trousers, and not a few of them did not understand how to properly shoot the weapons.... The only argument that appealed to these boys was the warning to stop firing before they had wasted all the ammunition in the city."

It is understood that these were white boys, as "negro" or "black" was a necessary descriptor in the newspaper style of the day when referring to African Americans.

Thus armed, the lynch mob took up occupancy at the Union Depot on Third and Chestnut streets, firing into the air and at black passers-by.

Meanwhile, the mayor had alerted nearby law enforcement, and word had gotten to Gov. Thomas Bickett, who enlisted as much of the state's military as he could muster. Troops came in by train from Greensboro, Charlotte, Mt. Airy and Raleigh with men, machine guns and an M1918 Ford tank, which by sunrise was parked across from the town hall. But by then it was over.

The official death toll was five including fireman Robert Young, who was killed while hosing down the crowd in front of town hall, and 13-year-old Rachel Levi, struck by a stray bullet through a window of her father's Main Street store. At the end of a long list of those injured - home guardsmen, bystanders, rioters, police - the Journal reported, "Three colored men were reported to have been killed and several colored people were injured."

Black lives obviously did not matter much in 1918.

Papers across the country had picked up the story by then, with varying degrees of agreement. The New York Times placed it on page 8 of the Nov. 18 edition, under the headline "SOUTHERN RACE RIOT COSTS FIVE LIVES." In the Times account, after disbursement the armed mob made for the black sections of the city. "Late tonight however," reads the report, "there had been no clash between the whites and the blacks."

Contrast that with the story from that day's Greensboro Daily News, which reported that the crowd broke up after Cora Childress' exhortations. "When news reached the negro quarter of the city," it went on, "demonstrations began immediately. Hardware stores and pawn shops were broken open, and the negroes procured arms and ammunition, completely ransacking the stock and shooting wildly in the streets. Later the negroes marched up the main streets of the city, firing at random, and leaving disorder in their wake."

The incident made the papers in 22 states - there were only 48 in 1918 - from the San Francisco Chronicle to the Burlington Free Press in Vermont.

The New York World wrote: "Winston-Salem has been the scene of a race riot as a result of which it counts, along with its damaged reputation, five persons slain by a mob and many injuries .... The crime in Winston-Salem is two and conspicuous, where it might have been one and soon forgotten. The one crime was that of a man. The other was that of a large proportion of the citizens of a community that should be far above such a lamentable resort to mob violence."

Oddly enough, one paper that declined to write about the incident was the Twin-City Daily Sentinel, Winston-Salem's other paper, which didn't touch the story until three days afterwards, in the Nov. 20, 1918 edition, in what seems largely a response to the World editorial, which it quoted extensively. The page 4 commentary poured a cool glass of water on the embers of the conflagration.

"Immediately following such an occurrence," it reads, "it is very difficult often to see things in their true perspective and there is a consequent danger of underestimating vital elements and over-estimating comparatively trivial elements. That this is true is shown by the hasty expression of some outside papers on the events here last Sunday."

In its cool-eyed observations, the editorial insists "there was no element of race rioting involved, as some newspapers on the outside have assumed.... Any tendency to confuse it with an expression of racial antipathy would be unfortunate...."

The Sentinel did pick up the story of the aftermath on Nov. 22, 1918, with a page 1 report.

Fourteen men had been arrested for trying to break into the jail, another dozen or so for looting, a single murder charge for Ernest Cromer for the murder of the fireman Robert Young and a slew of extra bodies just lying around the jail cells waiting to be charged.

Gov. Bickett appointed a special session of Surry County Superior Court under Judge HP Lane to handle the indictment on Dec. 30.

[MORE]

Publisher. Executive editor. Head paperboy.

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The last lynch mob | Page 2 of 3 | The NC Triad's altweekly

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"We were much too frightened to make any outcry," she said. "The negro forced us to leave the road and move back along the footpath running along the railroad.... Then he shot my husband twice." The assailant, she said, then brought her further along the footpath.

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RALEIGH, N.C. (WNCN) - Oberlin Cemetery in Raleigh in a sacred place not only because of the graves than can be seen, but also the ones that can't be seen.

People checking out the cemetery in the heart of North Carolina's capital can see most of the graves if they look closely. Spot one section of depressed ground about the length of a human body and the eye will start catching them everywhere.

"I feel a sense of sacredness," said Sabrina Goode. "I always feel like the spirits are surrounding me. It's like a canopy of peace in the middle of a hubbub. Very serene (and) sacred place.

Those in the unmarked, anonymous gravesites won't ever get the credit they deserve, Goode said.

"The people who are here are the people who literally built the city of Raleigh."

Goode is the executive director of the Friends of Oberlin Village.

Before Oberlin Cemetery became an official place of rest in 1873, it was a place where slaves were buried - quite possibly hundreds of them. Only unmarked stones or sunken ground is left to mark where they were buried.

"Now we can use that information to find funding and volunteer labor to mark those graves and tell those stories," said Dru McGill, who is an anthropologist with North Carolina State University. He is working with Goode. They've taken on the extraordinary task of trying to identify all of them.

"Historically, there have been fewer sites preserved of African-American heritage," McGill said. "We want to make sure that this site is so important in documenting African-American heritage and history in Raleigh, and Wake County and North Carolina gets the attention it deserves."

So far, at least 650 graves have been found. Less than half of those are marked. The cemetery is in Oberlin Village, which was founded by freed slaves.

"These markers may be, in some cases, one of only a few artifacts or pieces of physical evidence left to tell the stories of people who founded and raised this village into the thriving successful village that it was and is today," said McGill.

"A lot of information currently is below the ground, and what we'd like to do as an organization is raise it to the top and to be able to share it. And I think the citizens of not only Raleigh but the state and the nation would be absolutely surprised to see what they find out," added Goode.

Perhaps families who today know nothing about where they came from and where their ancestors are buried will finally have the answers that have been kept silent for well over a century.

Click here to learn more about the Friends of Oberlin Village.
More headlines from CBS17.com: For more stories like this that matter to you, click here to download the CBS 17 News app for free. Watch live newscasts, get breaking news and sign up for push alerts - download now

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Raleigh cemetery could be resting spot for hundreds of unidentified slaves

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RALEIGH, N.C. (WNCN) - Oberlin Cemetery in Raleigh in a sacred place not only because of the graves than can be seen, but also the ones that can't be seen. People checking out the cemetery in the heart of North Carolina's capital can see most of the graves if they look closely.

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Some of America's most notorious racist riots happened 100 years ago this summer. Confronting a national epidemic of white mob violence, 1919 was a time when black people in the United States defended themselves, fought back, and demanded full citizenship through thousands of acts of courage, small and large, individual and collective.

But pull a standard U.S. history textbook off the shelf and you're unlikely to find more than a paragraph on the 1919 riots. What you do find downplays both racism and black resistance while distorting facts in a dangerous "both sides" framing. These textbooks render students stupid about white supremacy and bereft of examples from those who defied it.

At this moment of revived racist backlash, all of us need to learn the lessons of 1919.

Throughout 1919 the exercise of black agency - black veterans wearing their military uniforms in public, black children swimming in the white section of Lake Michigan, black sharecroppers in Arkansas organizing for better wages and working conditions - was met with white mob terror. A wave of anti-black collective violence usually and problematically termed "race riots" occurred in Charleston, South Carolina; Longview, Texas; Bisbee, Arizona; Washington, D.C.; Chicago; Knoxville, Tennessee; Omaha, Nebraska; and Elaine, Arkansas. In addition, white supremacists lynched nearly 100 black people and initiated dozens of smaller racist clashes throughout the country in 1919. In Pittsburgh, the Klan made clear the goal of this bloody work in the printed notices posted around a black neighborhood: "The war is over, negroes. Stay in your place. If you don't, we'll put you there."

Red Summer - so deemed by NAACP leader James Weldon Johnson to capture its sheer bloodiness - is a study in what historian Carol Anderson calls white rage. In White Rage: the Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide, Anderson writes, "The trigger for white rage, inevitably, is black advancement. It is not the mere presence of black people that is the problem; rather, it is blackness with ambition, with drive, with purpose, with aspirations, and with demands for full and equal citizenship." According to historian David Krugler, the official death toll of 1919's epidemic of white rage exceeded 150. "The majority of the victims were black," he wrote, "Yet African Americans refused to surrender."

In Knoxville, Tennessee, armed black men organized themselves to successfully repel hundreds of white rioters who had already destroyed the county jail with a battering ram and dynamite. In Chicago, African-Americans formed self-defense units after days of white terror in their neighborhoods. Many of these defenders were veterans, among the 370,000 black men inducted into the Army during World War I who hoped fighting for democracy abroad might finally secure their first-class citizenship at home. The mob violence in Chicago convinced Harry Haywood, a veteran of the all-black 370th Infantry Regiment, he'd made a mistake. As he explained, "I had been fighting the wrong war. The Germans weren't the enemy - the enemy was right here at home."

In Washington, D.C., 17-year-old Carrie Johnson opened fire on men breaking into her home while 1,000 white rioters laid siege to her neighborhood. In Anniston, Alabama, in December of 1918, a black veteran, Sergeant Edgar Caldwell, was ordered out of the white section of a streetcar. He refused. Kicked out of the car and set upon by the white motorman and conductor, Caldwell shot his pistol twice, killing one of his attackers.

Though uncoordinated, when looked at together, these hundreds of moments in and leading up to 1919 read as an awesome display of collective black agency and self-preservation.

Just as contemporary targets of anti-black violence are often blamed for their own victimization - Michael Brown was "no angel" while white supremacists in Charlottesville are deemed "very fine people" - the white media's coverage of the 1919 riots almost always assigned blame for the violence to black people. But the black press, whose publishers and writers risked their lives in the pursuit of truth-telling, worked alongside black leaders and political organizations to establish a powerful counter-narrative. Black America's most influential newspaper, the Chicago Defender, carefully documented the riots while striking a tone of defiance, saying, "A Race that has furnished hundreds of thousands of the best soldiers that the world has ever seen is no longer content to turn the left cheek when smitten upon the right."

But students learn little of this early-20th-century episode of sustained, collective self-defense. Two of the three U.S. textbooks used in my school, outside of Portland, Oregon, devote only a single paragraph to the riots. The third has five paragraphs, focusing mostly on the D.C. riot, which would seem generous if the account didn't distort the history and leave students mystified about racism's role in the violence, writing:
Southern African Americans who had migrated to Washington, D.C., during the war had been competing for jobs in an atmosphere of mounting racial tension. Newspaper reports of rumored African American violence against whites contributed to the tension. Following one such newspaper story, 200 sailors and marines marched into the city, beating African American men and women. A group of whites also tried to break through military barriers to attack African Americans in their homes. Determined to fight back, a group of African Americans boarded a streetcar and attacked the motorman and the conductors. African Americans also exchanged gunfire with whites who drove or walked through their neighborhoods.
By opening its analysis of the riots with black people migrating and seeking work, this textbook structurally implies it was the actions of African-Americans - rather than the white mobs - that prompted the violence. This is the same kind of backward reasoning that makes note of Trayvon Martin's hoodie or Tamir Rice's airsoft pellet gun in explaining their killings. In this framing, black people always "do" something which justifies the violence that follows; white violence and volition is always incidental, never fundamental.

The authors of the textbook also erase the magnitude and breadth of the self-defense effort. A black newspaper, the New York Age, celebrated as "splendid" the reach of the resistance, which included "poolroom hangers-on and men from the alleys and side streets, people from the most ordinary walks of life." Neval Thomas, an active member of the Washington branch of the NAACP, counted 2,000 African-Americans - many of them armed - patrolling D.C. city blocks with the intention to "die for their race, and defy the white mob." White people were not being targeted because they "walked or drove through" black neighborhoods, as the modern-day textbook suggests, but because thousands of white people had organized themselves into mobs, and black people were determined to protect themselves.

These textbooks peddle in the ambiguity of "racial unrest," "racial violence," and the most ubiquitous offender, " race riot," to describe the events of 1919. These phrases give the impression of groups of blacks and whites in conflict with each other, responsibility shared by "both sides." But there is little doubt about who instigated these riots. As Cameron McWhirter has written, "In almost every case, white mobs - whether sailors on leave, immigrant slaughterhouse workers, or southern farmers - initiated the violence."

To capture the irrefutable fact of white culpability, a more accurate term might be racist riot. But "racism" or "racist" are terms these textbooks avoid.

The absence of a full-throated naming of racism's role in these episodes of anti-black collective violence matters. By downplaying the extent to which violent white supremacy shaped African-Americans' 20th-century experiences, textbooks leave students without the knowledge to fully account for racism as a key force in modern social relations. No wonder the question of reparations is so seldom seriously entertained in mainstream U.S. political discourse. We cannot repair a pattern of harm that we have been taught to neither acknowledge nor understand.

One hundred years ago, black people across the United States met white mob violence with countless defiant acts of self-defense. Today's Black Lives Matter activists fit seamlessly into this centuries-long pattern of black militant resistance to white supremacy - as they mobilize against the violent policies and militarized police that threaten their neighborhoods, as they challenge corporate media's habit of framing victims of white racist violence as the authors of their own destruction, as they demand we confront the damage white supremacy has wrought. Our students deserve the opportunity to identify this through line of black agency, rebellion, and resistance. It is a powerful call to action for all of us: Red Summer is now.
Ursula Wolfe-Rocca is an organizer/curriculum writer for the Zinn Education Project and high school social studies teacher.

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Some of America's most notorious racist riots happened 100 years ago this summer. Confronting a national epidemic of white mob violence, 1919 was a time when black people in the United States defended themselves, fought back, and demanded full citizenship through thousands of acts of courage, small and large, individual and collective.

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Wake County School Desegregation History

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Wake County School Desegregation History

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(10 min video)

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History of the Wake County Public School System

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Joseph Holt Jr. on school desegregation -Interview by Alice Bernstein

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Mr. Holt on Brown vs. Board on 60th Anniversary

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Mr. Holt on Brown vs. Board on 60th Anniversary

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Raleigh Pioneer Remembers Brown | Season 2900 Episode 2920 | Black Issues Forum

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Raleigh school integration pioneer Joseph H. Holt Jr. shares his civil rights story.

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Ta-Nehisi Coates Dismantles Mitch McConnell's Remarks on Reparations

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The author of "Between the World and Me" and "We Were Eight Years in Power" gives a searing testimony on the legacy of slavery

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Current Apex sheriff apologizes to Lynn Council who suffered an attempted lynching in 1952.

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Current Apex sheriff apologizes to Lynn Council who suffered an attempted lynching in 1952.

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Sixty-seven years after he was strung up on a red oak tree by a pair of white North Carolina sheriff's deputies seeking to extract a confession out of him, the now-86-year-old Lynn Council finally got an apology for his near-lynching.

Council, who lives in Apex, on Thursday met with the current Wake County Sheriff Gerald Baker to recount how he narrowly avoided getting killed by the two officers in 1952.

'They took me down to the woods to kill me,' Council recalled. 'That's what they took me down there for, but things didn't happen that way.'

Baker issued Council a formal apology on behalf of his agency, gifted the octogenarian a large silver key to the sheriff's office and extended to him an open invitation to come and visit any time he wants, reported ABC11.

'I cannot change what they did and its effect on your life and this county,' Baker said, 'but we're here to let you know that this office is here to serve and protect each and every person that resides in this county.'

Baker also publicly removed from the department's wall of honor a framed photograph of Robert Pleasants, who served as sheriff at the time Council was nearly lynched.

It all started when Council, who was 19 years old at the time, and seven others were picked up by the notoriously brutal Apex Police Chief Sam Bagwell on suspicion of robbing a store.

The crime took place outside the city limits, so Bagwell struck Council, drove him to Wake County and dropped him off at the local jail, despite his protestations of innocence, reported WRAL.

A few days later, two sheriff's deputies came into Council's cell and told him they were going to drive him out into the countryside and hang him.

The deputies brought a handcuffed Council to the red oak tree in the woods off Ten Ten Road, looped one end of a rope around his neck and the other around a tree branch, and lifted him a few feet off the ground.

Council said the deputies demanded that he confess to the robbery, but he refused because he said he was not guilty.

Having failed to get a confession from him, the deputies lowered Council to the ground after a minute or two and let him go, leaving him with a permanent ligature mark around his neck.

Recalling his lucky escape, Council said: 'Jesus stepped in.'

The deputies who nearly killed Council were never charged or disciplined for their actions.

In making amends to Council on Thursday, Sheriff Baker expressed commitment to integrity, transparency and accountability.

'It's just the right thing to do,' said the sheriff. 'We're all human beings and we need to make sure we treat each other that way.'

John Letteney, who presently occupies the post of the chief of police in Apex, formally apologized to Council in April, telling him his predecessor, Bagwell, didn't deserve to wear a badge and failed his oath to serve the public.

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North Carolina sheriff apologizes to black man for attempted lynching by deputies in 1952

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Sixty-seven years after he was strung up on a red oak tree by a pair of white North Carolina sheriff's deputies seeking to extract a confession out of him, the now-86-year-old Lynn Council finally got an apology for his near-lynching.

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Two historical markers now stand where lynchings took place in downtown Nashville during the 1800s.

They're the first such markers in the city. They were unveiled as a part of Juneteenth, which commemorates the abolition of slavery.

One of the new signs tells the story of the Grizzard brothers, who were two black men accused of assaulting two white women near Goodlettsville. Both men were killed without trials by white mobs in 1892.

The other details the lynchings of David Jones, also in 1892, and Jo Reed, in 1895. All four men were killed after staying in the Davidson County jail.

"Despite the duty of law enforcement to provide custodial protection, the jail was a repeated site of lynching and violence that devastated the African American community," said Tennessee State University professor Lee Williams, who read the narrative to a crowd of local officials, advocates and African American community leaders.

The signs are placed by the Cumberland River, near where the jail once stood.

Two nonprofits - We Remember Nashville and the Montgomery, Ala.-based Equal Justice Initiative - organized and funded the markers. The Equal Justice Initiative has counted six lynchings in Davidson county between 1877 and 1950, according to its latest report.

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New Historical Markers Show Where Lynchings Took Place In Davidson County

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Two historical markers now stand where lynchings took place in downtown Nashville during the 1800s. They're the first such markers in the city. They were unveiled as a part of Juneteenth, which commemorates the abolition of slavery. One of the new signs tells the story of the Grizzard brothers, who were two black men accused of assaulting two white women near Goodlettsville.

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George Taylor Soil Collection 100th Commemoration

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October 30-November 5 marks a century after the horrific lynching of George Taylor. This anniversary has inspired a coalition of students, teachers, our religious community, and civic leaders to form the Wake County Truth & Reconciliation Committee.

We invite ALL Wake County's citizens to join our Citizen's Promise between October 30-Nov 5, 2018.
With this handful of Wake County soil I pledge...

To remember all those who have been victims of any injustice.

To choose to create an opportunity for reconciliation in our community.

To promise to no longer remain silent or passive in the face of White Supremacy, racial hatred, or any social injustice.

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1918 Lynching of George Taylor - 100th Anniversary

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October 30-November 5 marks a century after the horrific lynching of George Taylor. This anniversary has inspired a coalition of students, teachers, our religious community, and civic leaders to form the Wake County Truth & Reconciliation Committee. We invite ALL Wake County's citizens to join our Citizen's Promise between October 30-Nov 5, 2018.

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Full article

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Wake County students commemorate 100th anniversary of lynching | News & Observer

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Students from Exploris Middle School and Middle Creek and Knightdale high schools are urging the community to remember the 100th anniversary of the only recorded lynching in Wake County. They say it will help bring racial reconciliation.

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1918 Rolesville Lynching, Wake Forest Weekly

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1918 Rolesville Lynching, Wake Forest Weekly

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george taylor lynching centennial article.pdf

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Deborah Brogden, Raleigh Letter to the Editor N&O

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Deborah Brogden, Raleigh Letter to the Editor N&O

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Bryan Stevenson Wants the U.S. to Face Its History

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The lawyer and social justice activist on mass incarceration, the national lynching memorial and Robert E. Lee Day.

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The Civil-Rights Luminary You’ve Never Heard Of

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Pauli Murray was an architect of two of the most important social-justice movements of the twentieth century, Kathryn Schulz wrote, in 2017. Why isn’t she better known?

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Her name was Alma Howze. Her sister's name was Maggie and she was hung with sisal rope next to her. The names of their children, still unborn, still inside their bellies, we will never know. It is said that people who came to see the bodies of the sisters hanging from a bridge in Shubuta, Mississippi, in 1918, could still see the babies "wriggling" inside even after the mothers died.

I no longer believe that accounts of barbarism against black bodies in America elicit empathy or shame. I believe, in fact, that barbarism against black bodies has and continues to be an American pastime.

What interests me here are the people who came to see the hanging of the Howze sisters-the spectators, those who came with their covered dishes of potato salad for an afternoon of noosed necks. These hangings were not incidental; they were ritualized entertainment. Sometimes the audience would participate, setting fire to the bodies after they were released from the tree limbs. The spectators often took souvenirs, like skin from the backs to make wallets and purses. Or smaller momentos to pocket, like a finger or toe.

Photos snapped and used as postcards were distributed nationwide. One such postcard was source material for Kerry James Marshall's Heirlooms and Accessories, in which the artist frames the faces of three white women, spectators at a double hanging, in bejeweled pendants. The expressions on the faces of the women do not reflect the macabre scene they witness: They range from indifferent to amused. The artist explains he named his masterwork "Accessories" in that these women were accessories to a double murder, "Heirlooms" in that they would pass on an inheritance of violence with impunity.

Mississippi Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith, in musing she'd follow a friend "to a public hanging," proclaims herself as the heir to this inheritance. She boasts of it.

Thousands have petitioned for Ms. Hyde-Smith's removal and-if she can forage a conscience-her resignation. However, even if Ms. Hyde-Smith vacates her office, it will be mere dumbshow. The man who appointed her, Gov. Phil Bryant, will still be in power. The man who designated April as "Confederate History Month." The man who is a dues-paying member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. The man who is an unrelenting defender of Mississippi's state flag.

And while Mississippi's state flag includes the flag of the Confederacy, the butchery of the Confederacy was outlived and outperformed by the butchery of the State of Mississippi, which found its true and current expression in the Ku Klux Klan.

This demands disambiguation.

Mississippi's state flag, with its 13-starred saltire, is the flag of the KKK. The lynchings Ms. Hyde-Smith references in her remark "of regard" happened largely after the Confederacy folded. The Klan took over and was so embedded in government and law enforcement in Mississippi that its usual calling cards were deemed redundant. My own town of McComb, Mississippi was called "the bombing capital of the world." Those who carried out these crimes were not redneck outliers in wood shacks; they worked out of law offices and police cars and they never saw a day in jail. Their children and grandchildren will likely break bread with them this holiday season, safe in their warm homes, far beyond the reach of justice.

It is essential to note the verb Ms.Hyde-Smith used. She did not say "would have; she said she "would," indicating she knows that lynchings are a very present practice.

There are new names joining Maggie and Alma Howze on the list of lynching victims, names like William Andrew Jones and James Anderson. And all of this happens under the protecting cloak of Mississippi's flag.

It's past time for the Confederate symbol on Mississippi's flag to be outlawed, similar to the way the swastika was outlawed in Germany after World War II. The United States led the effort to make that a reality in Germany, and yet refuses to do so here. And so it is that America is complicit in every crime, every act of violence that's been permitted and instructed by the Confederate flag.

There is a growing movement in Mississippi to reject this inheritance of violence and criminality. All of its public universities have taken down the flag. Towns and cities have removed the flag from all public property. It is time that the state follows the example of its citizens.

Sen. Hyde-Smith, Gov. Phil Bryant, and that flag must go. Their overdue departure will be a righteous purge for a land whose rivers and trees and soil are still teeming with black blood.

The flow of that blood is warm and wide and not bound by Mississippi's borders.These lynchings happen still. Nooses have been replaced by bullets, sometimes not replaced at all. The flow of that blood is warm and wide.

That blood. It overflows.

Aunjanue Ellis is an actor and writer. She is currently in production on the Ava Duvernay directed miniseries Central Park Five for Netflix and can soon be seen in the release of Barry Jenkins's If Beale Street Could Talk. She calls McComb, Mississippi her home, and has started a Change.org petition rallying supporters of removing the Confederate symbol from Mississippi's state flag.
The views expressed in this article are the author's own.​​​​​

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Senator Hyde-Smith and the Mississippi flag must go. Their heritage is teeming with black blood | Opinion

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Her name was Alma Howze. Her sister's name was Maggie and she was hung with sisal rope next to her. The names of their children, still unborn, still inside their bellies, we will never know.