Confronting history, Congress studies addition of lynching sites to national

The U.S. House is considering a bill that would put lynching sites in western Tennessee on track to become part of the National Park Service, part of a trend this year of Congress using the agency to advance discussions of the nation’s troubled and often violent racial history.

A bill from U.S. Rep. Steve Cohen, a Tennessee Democrat, would require the National Park Service to study the feasibility of adding sites in and around Memphis where white mobs committed lynchings for decades, from just after the Civil War to the Jim Crow era.

Proponents of the bill say understanding an ugly past in which Black people were terrorized and murdered is important.

“Until we remind people of our past, we will not over overcome it, and we will not have a better society,” Cohen said during a July subcommittee hearing on the bill. “We need to recognize the errors in our past.”

Some 119 lynchings have been recorded in all regions of Virginia between 1866 and 1934, according to data collected through James Madison University’s “Racial Terror: Lynchings in Virginia” project.  Most of the lynchings were of Black men, although 22 were of White people.

In 2019, the Virginia House of Delegates and Senate passed a resolution “acknowledg[ing] with profound regret the existence and acceptance of lynching within the Commonwealth.”

“The legacy of racism that outlived slavery, enabled the rise and acceptance of lynching, facilitated segregation and disenfranchisement, and denied education and civil rights to African Americans has yet to be uprooted in Virginia, the South, and the nation, and this dark and shameful chapter of American history must be understood, acknowledged, and fully documented and the seemingly irreparable breach mended,” the resolution read in part.

Preserving pieces of history has taken on added importance amid a heated national debate about how the nation’s history of centuries of slavery and oppression of Black people should be taught, Tiffany Patterson, the chair of Vanderbilt University’s African American and diaspora studies program, said in an interview.

“There’s a backlash coming from the political arena and spilling over into parents and teachers and politicians and so on that are terrified of that being really discussed,” she said. “So I think, acknowledging places and making it a kind of museum for teaching purposes for the general public is what’s needed.”

Rich Watkins, the chairman of the board of the Lynching Sites Project of Memphis, a nonprofit seeking to commemorate about two dozen sites of lynchings in the area, said part of his group’s goal was to establish a shared set of facts that could then lead to meaningful reflection.

“We are, unfortunately, in an era where people disagree about the facts,” Watkins said in an interview.

The history of lynchings — racist extrajudicial killings — is often not taught in schools, Watkins said. While most lynching victims were Black, mobs also attacked non-Black people who may have helped Black people, according to the NAACP civil rights organization.

Nearly 5,000 people were…