'Lynching In America' Confronts Country's Violent, Racist Past

Screenshot courtesy of Equal Justice Initiative

"Truth telling and reconciliation."

This is how Bryan Stevenson, founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), has described his latest project Lynching in America, which was formed from a report published by the EJI called Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror. Prior to the platform going live on Tuesday, Stevenson and Justin Steele, Principal of Google.org, spoke about the project and offered a preview of its features at Google NYC.

"I don't think slavery ended in 1865 — I think it evolved," Stevenson said. "It turned into decades of terrorism, and this era of terror and violence is an era that we haven't talked very much about — we go through the civil war through the civil rights movement without any acknowledgment of all of the damage that was done through this 100 year time period."

READ: Boston Law School Leads Project On Cold Cases Of Lynching

Lynching in America attempts to fill that void, chronicling over 4,000 lynchings that occurred between 1877 and 1950 throughout the United States. One feature a part of the website includes an interactive web page where users can click different states to see how many lynchings happened in each county, with some even including a narration of certain lynchings that took place. One example of this can be found upon clicking on Lamar County in Texas where Stevenson narrates the death of Henry Smith, a black man who attempted to flee Paris, Texas after he discovered he was suspected of killing a white woman, only to be seized by a posse and stripped naked, beaten, and burned alive in front of 10,000 people. Afterward, the crowd clamored for souvenirs of the lynching, retrieving everything from Smith's ashes to his bones.

Screenshot courtesy of Equal Justice Initiative

The website also includes audio and video stories centered around families that volunteered to tell their stories about relatives that were lynched. One video tells the story of Thomas Miles Sr., a black man who was lynched in Shreveport, Louisiana in 1912 for allegedly passing a note to a white woman. Over 100 years later, his Shirah Dedman, his great-granddaughter, traveled to Shreveport to learn more about his death. Dedman and her mother and aunt learn that Miles was arrested but was released for insufficient evidence against him. However, they released him out of the back of the jail, where a mob was waiting for him. He was shot to death and hung.

The family continues to research the incident and interprets Miles' death as a warning to other black people that were trying to better themselves in the city, with Miles having been the owner of his own store.

READ: Georgia Police Chief Apologizes For Lynching Of Black Man In 1940

"The point of these lynchings at the time is that there was no accountability," Dedman says in the video's final seconds. "So to have accountability that would completely change the black experience in America and the fact that as a black person you don't expect justice. I'm not trying to get anybody to erase the past, what I'm trying to say now is that we bring it into the present. We have to recognize the past in order to move forward."

Lynching in America will continue to expand. During the preview event Stevenson said that more families have since asked to participate in the project, which will hopefully lead to unveiling other lynchings across the country (viewing the interactive map you will see that a good portion of states is unreported). But this is surely a necessary component in confronting America's horrific past, a tool that can be used to inform people about the ways racism in this country continues to affect black people.