1917 Persons’ lynching site advances toward National Historic Register status
The lynching site that drew a crowd of 5,000 in 1917 is now an overgrown area by the Wolf River west of Summer Avenue.
There are 7 article(s) tagged Lynching Sites Project of Memphis:
The lynching site that drew a crowd of 5,000 in 1917 is now an overgrown area by the Wolf River west of Summer Avenue.
The lynching of Ell Persons on May 22, 1917, shaped Memphis history. Now, 105 years later, the site has remained nearly unscathed, but what has changed?
“I think it’s really important to memorialize these events because human nature is to try to cover up painful parts of our history,” Lynching Sites Project of Memphis board member Laura Faith Kebede tells Eric Barnes.
Almost 82 years after the last documented lynching in Tennessee, a Republican and a Democrat want to commemorate all 154 victims statewide with Community Remembrance Project.
A ceremony Thursday at the site of three lynchings more than a century ago was part of a week of Ida B. Wells events leading up to Friday’s statue unveiling.
Wells, whose journalistic roots were formed in the Memphis area, was honored by the Pulitzer Prize committee “For her outstanding and courageous reporting on the horrific and vicious violence against African Americans during the era of lynching.”
The ceremony is the organization’s third lynching marker dedication of 36 total known victims to such violence in Shelby County’s history.
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