A remembrance for Howard Cooper in Towson, Md., in 2022. The Black teenager was lynched by a white mob in 1885 outside what was then the Baltimore County Jail. Historians estimate there were 4,084 racial terror lynchings in 12 Southern states between 1877 and 1950. (Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post)
For years, activists in Franklin, Tenn., have lobbied for a public marker to remember three men lynched there in the summer of 1868.
Acknowledging the deaths of two Black men, William Guthrie and Lawrence Bowman, and a Jewish man, Samuel A. Bierfield, would force a needed conversation about the town’s racist past, supporters say. Guthrie was murdered after the family of a white woman alleged he had sexually assaulted her, which he denied. The Ku Klux Klan attacked Bierfield for his sympathy toward Black residents, including Bowman, an employee in his store, according to researchers for the Williamson (County) Remembers Committee.
But the effort has been repeatedly blocked by critics worried it could divide the small town south of Nashville that was the site of a key Civil War battle.
The marker would be unfair to other victims of violent crime, opponents say, and could even leave the town on the hook for financial reparations to its Black residents, who make up about 6% of the population. Some worry that the monument would glorify lynchings; others, that it would put the blame on all white residents.
“These markers tell a one-sided story, focusing solely on strife, violence, racism, and anti-Semitism, while leaving out the many uplifting and virtuous stories of our city’s history,” then-alderman Gabrielle Hanson wrote in a Facebook post in October while running for mayor of Franklin. Hanson, who lost the election, didn’t respond to a call or email seeking comment.
Williamson Remembers, which is lobbying local officials for a plaque to acknowledge the lynchings, hopes to resubmit a plan to Franklin leaders soon, said Lamont Turner, a member of the group.
The tension is another front in the national debate over whether America should acknowledge its racist past or leave it behind. While some communities have proposed paying reparations to the descendants of enslaved people or torn down Confederate statues, others are limiting the way Black history is taught and say it’s time to move on.
Within this debate, activists say, lynchings remain a taboo topic.
Historians estimate there were 4,084 racial terror lynchings in 12 Southern states between 1877 and 1950.
But those incidents have often gone unacknowledged.
Across the country, researchers are trying to restore the historical record, poring through newspaper archives and public records for evidence of overlooked lynchings of Black Americans. In the past few years, activists have successfully lobbied for markers acknowledging such killings in Mississippi in 1908 and Kentucky in 1894.
“There’s a reckoning going on across the country to say, ‘Let’s just tell the full story. Don’t just tell part of the history,’ ” said Russ Adcox, a pastor in Columbia, Tenn., who is lobbying for markers acknowledging the 14 lynchings that happened in his community. “Until you recognize history, you can’t really heal from it.”
But these efforts have often met resistance from local residents — both Black and white.
“The collective nature of lynching may make it especially difficult for communities to face,” said Margaret Vandiver, a retired professor of criminal justice researching lynchings in Tennessee. “The responsibility for what was done cannot plausibly be blamed on one or a few bad people but extends to the majority of the white community.”
Last year, a music video by country star Jason Aldean for his song “Try That in a Small Town,” which critics said contained coded threats against Black people, became part of a national conversation about the historical significance of lynching sites. The Maury County Courthouse in Columbia, where 18-year-old Henry Choate was lynched in 1927, served as a backdrop in the video.
Choate was accused of attacking a 16-year-old white girl, which he denied. Kidnapped from jail, he was lynched by a mob of about 350 white men at the courthouse.
Aldean said he wasn’t aware of the courthouse’s history and, “knowing what I know now,” would have changed the location of the video.
For years, local activists have wanted a marker to memorialize Choate in Maury County, where the gravestone of Ku Klux Klan grand wizard and Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest is located.
The Columbia Peace and Justice Initiative, a local advocacy group, plans to push for a marker, but for now is focusing on getting a statue of Thurgood Marshall, said Adcox, the pastor. The future Supreme Court justice was nearly lynched outside Columbia in 1946 after defending two Black men charged in a race riot. While leaving town, Marshall was pulled over by police and taken down a dirt road where several white men were waiting for him. He was saved when friends following in another car arrived.
There is a historical marker acknowledging the riot — in which white residents rampaged through a Black neighborhood but no white person was charged. However, there’s nothing for the numerous lynchings in the community, Adcox said.
“There’s a shame in the white community” associated with lynchings, said Adcox, who is white. “You don’t want to acknowledge that your ancestors might’ve been involved in something as shameful as a lynching.”
In Cane Ridge, a small community outside Nashville, a historical marker was recently created to remember 15-year-old Samuel Smith.
In 1924, Smith and his uncle, Eugene, were accused of trying to steal car parts from a white grocer’s home. The uncle and homeowner traded gunfire and Samuel was shot. Later, masked men kidnapped Samuel from his hospital room, hanged him and shot him again, according to newspaper reports at the time. No one was convicted in his murder.
The bullet holes from the initial confrontation are still visible in the tree where Smith was hanged, said Nashville Metropolitan Council member Joy Styles, who lobbied for the marker.
When the proposal for a marker came before Nashville’s historic commission in 2020, some community members balked at the idea. People who claimed to be descendants of the grocer said at the hearings that Smith shot at their family member and shouldn’t be memorialized, according to local media reports. Those descendants couldn’t be reached for comment.
The marker was ultimately placed near the site of the lynching in April of last year before being stolen a couple of months later. “It has been reordered and we are going to put some security around it so that this cannot happen again,” Styles said.
Sometimes, community opposition has crossed racial lines.
In Madison County, Tenn., an hour’s drive from Memphis, residents split over how and whether to acknowledge the location where at least two Black people were lynched in 1886 and 1891.
Cindy Boyles, an associate professor of criminal justice at the University of Tennessee, first heard of Eliza Woods in 2014 during a ghost tour in Jackson.
“They were using this horrible story of a mob lynching of this Black woman as entertainment for white folks,” said Boyles, who is white. “And I thought, you know, we just need to know the real story about what actually happened here.”
Boyles went to her local library and found the original newspaper articles published about Woods. On Aug. 16, 1886, Woods, a Black housekeeper, was accused of poisoning her white employer. Woods was dragged to the Madison County Courthouse and her clothes were ripped off. She was hanged from a tree, her body riddled with bullets, Boyles learned.
But when researchers with the Jackson-Madison County Community Remembrance Project, which Boyles helped found, sought markers for Woods and another victim, John Brown, who was lynched in 1891, local officials, both Black and white, resisted.
Boyles had partnered with the Equal Justice Initiative, a nonprofit that promotes criminal justice reform and chronicles lynchings, to secure funding for the marker, but also needed the approval of local officials to place it on public property, at the Madison County Courthouse. (EJI declined to make anyone available for an interview.)
During public hearings, Gary Deaton, chair of the Madison County Commission, questioned whether EJI’s connection to billionaire philanthropist George Soros, who has provided funding to the group, would give the marker a political agenda, according to the Jackson Sun. Deaton, who is white, didn’t respond to an interview request.
A major division also emerged over whether the plaque should include the words “white supremacy” to describe the motivation for the incidents. Some officials wanted the language toned down, Boyles said.
“There was nothing in the wording that was wrong,” Boyles said. “It was just trying to tell the truth.”
But the proposal also ran into resistance from Black elected officials, who wondered whether the marker would put excessive attention on a violent era in the community, which was also the site of several small Civil War battles.
“I thought it was advocating lynching and it was downright offensive to me,” said Terry Spearman, who is Black and was a Madison County commissioner at the time.
The Madison County Commission initially rejected the proposal before approving it with Spearman’s support.
“Once I learned more, I just got super-duper excited about it because it was the right thing to do,” Spearman said.
The marker, including the reference to “white supremacy,” was placed in front of the Madison County Courthouse. “After the Civil War, violent resistance to equal rights for African Americans and an ideology of white supremacy led to fatal violence against Black women, men and children accused of violating social customs, engaging in interracial relationships, or crimes,” reads the sign, placed in 2020.
But a marker is not the right way to address all lynchings, said Annie Whitlock, whose father was murdered in 1954.
In May of that year, in Vredenburgh, Ala., Russell Charley didn’t come home from work and three of his six children went out looking for him. They found their father hanging in a tree and castrated.
A local policeman paid the county sheriff’s office $6,000 to have the death listed as a suicide, according to an FBI investigation conducted shortly afterward, which referred to the incident as a lynching.
Charley’s sons were teenagers when they had to cut their father down from the tree, Whitlock said. She was 5.
Now 74, Whitlock said having a marker at the site where Charley was lynched would serve as a painful reminder “of how my father suffered and how he died.” Instead, Whitlock is seeking financial compensation and an apology from the town.
“I need to hit them where it hurts. I need to make the whole town pay compensation,” Whitlock said.
The mayor of Vredenburgh, a town of fewer than 1,000 people in southern Alabama, didn’t reply to an email requesting comment.
Despite opposition in their communities, some activists aren’t ready to give up.
In northwest Tennessee, members of the Weakley County Reconciliation Project, launched in 2018, are preparing a proposal to county officials for a marker to recognize six lynching victims.
When it comes to lynchings, “people don’t want to talk about it,” said Joyce Washington, chair of the group.
Weakly County Mayor Jake Bynum, who is white, said he would support the effort. The group behind the proposal has “been diligent in their commitment to bringing awareness to the community related to not only lynchings in Weakley County but all the concerns associated with race,” Bynum wrote in an email.
But Washington said she has sensed resistance before, including when the reconciliation project collected soil in the area where a 21-year-old man named Mallie Wilson was lynched. Wilson was hanged by a mob in 1915 after being accused of entering the bedroom of a white woman, according to newspaper reports at the time.
The soil was sent off to EJI’s Legacy Museum, which includes an exhibit of 800 jars of soil collected from lynching sites nationwide.
“It’s uncomfortable and it’s painful and there’s a lot of shame and guilt behind it,” Washington, who is Black, said of the issue of lynchings. “But I believe there’s no place for shame or guilt. We need to engage in courageous conversations, and people by and large are not willing to do that.”
