Memphis Flyer

Many thanks to Martha Parks and the Memphis Flyer for this wonderful article about the involvement of high school students in the Ell Persons story:

This time last year, the 100th anniversary of Ell Persons' lynching seemed far on the horizon. A lot has happened over the course of the year, as Memphians have rallied around the work of the Lynching Sites Project.

So, it appears, do Memphians Howard and Beverly Robertson of Trust Marketing, who this week, at the National Civil Rights Museum, were to unveil a campaign on behalf of the Lynching Sites Project of Memphis, described in their press release as "a nonprofit Tennessee organization formed to locate and mark known lynching sites."

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.

Last winter, with a scrawled list of the streets and landmarks mentioned in 100-year-old newspaper articles, I drove east through Memphis, past Shelby Farms, to what I believed might have been the place where a black woodchopper named Ell Persons was burned alive before thousands of spectators. I walked along the edge of the Wolf River, unsure whether this was the place. The river was narrower than I expected, and the bridge was newer than I thought it should have been.