Lett’s Stand Against Debt Peonage Cost His Life

A genealogist, teacher, and writer from Alabama became interested in Lett’s story when teaching middle school students genealogy, ELA, and social studies. She took them on a field trip to EJI’s Lynching Memorial, where they saw Oliver Lett’s name and realized that he was an ancestor of many of her students.

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8 Suspected Lynchings Have Taken Place in Mississippi Since 2000

There is no more blatant form of racial intimidation against a Black person that one can use than that of a noose. The practice of lynching was used against enslaved Black people, but it was an especially popular form of violence against Black Americans after slavery ended. It is considered a more dated form of violence today, but a story in the Washington Post reports that the practice of lynching never truly stopped.
Jill Collen Jefferson, a lawyer and founder of Julian, a civil rights organization named after the late civil rights leader Julian Bond, has been conducting her own research into lynching in Mississippi and found that at least eight Black people have been lynched in the state since 2000.

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How a white mob lynched a Black man, destroyed a city – and got away with it

The lynching of Will Brown is one of the many riots and massacres of Blacks by whites that took place in and around the “Red Summer” of 1919. This one was meticulously documented in words and photos. It was also witnessed by 14-year-old Henry Fonda, who would become a highly acclaimed Academy Award-winning American film actor, best known for his roles as plain-speaking idealists. A commemoration of the lynching and placement of a marker on Brown’s grave was held in Omaha in 2019, on the hundredth anniversary of this episode of racial terror.

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