Jackson, Tenn.– Jackson State Community College will host a public ceremony to honor the victims of three documented lynchings in Madison County on Feb. 23 at Ayers Auditorium in the McWherter Building.
“We need to take an honest, unflinching look at a disturbing and painful part of our history,” said Bob Raines, Professor of Psychology at Jackson State Community College, who helped organize the ceremony. “This history shapes our present; it is our cultural inheritance.” A satellite branch of Jackson State is located in Paris.
A presentation by the Equal Justice Initiative, a nonprofit advocate of racial justice, will begin at 1 p.m. The ceremony, Community Remembrance: A Memorial for the Lynching Victims of Madison County, will begin at 2 p.m.
The program will include speakers, such as Madison County NAACP President Harrell Carter, Attorney General Jody Pickens, and various historians, professors, and pastors. James Mayo composed a piece of original music for the event, which he will perform on guitar, and Ester Gray Lemus will direct Jackson State’s vocal ensemble, Innovation. James Cherry will also read a poem that he wrote specifically for the event.
“We hope to create a space for honest dialogue,” Raines said. “It is through ceremonies like these that we can acknowledge and tell the whole truth about our social and cultural inheritance and honor the memory of people who were victims of injustice. The three victims from Madison County – Eliza Woods, John Brown and Frank Ballard – deserve a time and space for sober reflection, where we state unequivocally that what happened to them was wrong.”
Sponsors include the Madison County Branch of the NAACP, the Lane College Chapter of the NAACP and the Equal Justice Initiative. Raines added that Carter and Lane College Historian Ameera Graves were great partners to work with while planning the ceremony.
Similar ceremonies have been held in Brownsville, Alamo and cities throughout the South. They are opportunities for communities to heal and rally around shared values of equality and justice.
The events are part of a greater effort by the Equal Justice Initiative to remember the past via the Memorial to Lynching Victims in Montgomery, Ala. Between 1877 and 1950, there were 233 documented lynchings in Tennessee and more than 4,000 throughout the South. The memorial is collecting soil samples in jars from the location of each lynching.
For more information, visit www.jscc.edu and www.eji.org.
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