Page 128 - Middle Georgia State University - Knighted 2019

while another woman screamed and pulled against her rusty chains. The statues were more than
just moving; they spoke to me. The voices of those families torn apart, those men and women
shackled and sold, their cries rung in my ears as I stood, staring at the statues.

Inside the Memorial, there was silence, broken only by the gentle murmur of a hidden
waterfall. As I walked among the bronze tombstones, a series of revelations began to unfold
before me, one after another. The sheer quantity of the markers, let alone the number of names
engraved on them, was baffling. Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama, and Texas repeatedly appeared,
with nearly every county in each state responsible for at least one lynching. Once the quantity
was understood and compartmentalized within my mind, I had to come to grips with the actual
locations where the acts took place. Macon County, North Carolina, where my mother’s side of
the family hails from, had many. Areas of Texas, where I used to live, had hundreds of names to
atone for. Without this memorial, I never would have known of the extent and volume of
lynching in America's history. Before this visit, lynching, to me, was another sad side note of
American history, often overlooked by the general public. As I walked past name after name of
victims, and was exposed to the reasons which justified such heinous actions, I became aware of
the true nature of lynching in the American narrative: lynching was the perversion of all core
American ideals. Mob rule, arrest without a warrant, trial without due process, sentencing
without the right to appeal, cruel and unusual punishment, no freedom of speech, the complete
disregard for life, liberty, and property, these were the tenets of lynching, and existed in direct
opposition to the principles which established this nation.

“A black man was lynched in Millersburg, Ohio, in 1892 for ‘standing around’ in
a white neighborhood.”

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