News

Oliver Clasper, a friend of the Lynching Sites Project of Memphis, has had his photographs incorporated into an article "Focusing on the Hidden Horror of American Lynchings,” published in The Atlantic’s web magazine City Lab.

Ollie gives credit to the Equal Justice Initiative, NAACP, and the Lynching Sites Project of Memphis, with particular note to Clarence Christian.

An empty trestle bridge spans a grey river. White-washed doors lean on the side of a barn. Telephone poles and a tin shed frame a half-mowed ravine.

by Carla Peacher-Ryan

On Thursday, April 6, at the Cannon Center, Hattiloo Theatre, in partnership with the Memphis Symphony Orchestra, presented an original performance - "The Strange Fruit". Conceived by Ekundayo Bandele, executive director of Hattiloo, the show is a compilation of work by the two presenting partners, as well as Collage Dance Collective, Le Chorale a cappella choir, with narratives from Rychetta Watkins and Phil Darius Wallace. It is a work that deals with lynching and was sparked by the work of the Lynching Sites Project of Memphis.

Matteo and I have been collaborating on this amazing story for almost a year. With the help of historians, archivists, and the energy and expertise of the people working with The Lynching Sites Project of Memphis, we have very nearly completed research on historical background of this tragedy. We have scouted and filmed almost all the major locations associated with this lynching, and have identified and located descendants of the families and individuals involved in the lynching and are now in the process of interviewing those willing to talk.

Two markers will memorialize the tragic and shameful events that occurred here in the spring of 1917.

Both markers, approved Thursday by the Shelby County Historical Commission, will mention the two victims of those events.

Antoinette Rappel, a 15-year-old white girl who was brutally assaulted and murdered on her way to school April 30, 1917.

Ell Persons, a 50-something black woodcutter accused of the crime who was brutally assaulted and murdered by a lynch mob May 22 that year.

"More than 120 years ago, a tragedy in Memphis made the front page of the New York Times. Thursday marks the 125th anniversary of the People's Grocery Store Lynching..."

"The Scotts and the Taneys believe that Americans should learn from their history, not bury their history," they have said in a joint statement.

The accuser "confessed that she had fabricated the most sensational part of her testimony...Her changed attitude, if genuine, might have real meaning today, what with a polarized electorate, renewed racial tensions, and organizations and Web sites promoting white supremacy.

African-American historian John Ashworth will lead a citywide interfaith prayer service May 21st at the site where Persons was murdered, nearly 100 years to the date it occurred. Newspapers in 1917 created a spectacle of Persons' death for days leading to it, gathering thousands of people to what is now Summer and the Wolf River. After he was set afire, Persons was decapitated and taken to Beale Street, and his head was hurled at a group of black pedestrians.