Public Sculpture in Tennessee Will Memorialize Lynching Victim
In 1906, a mob of white Chattanooga, Tennessee, residents abducted Ed Johnson, a young black man, from his jail cell. After they dragged him through the streets, they hung him by his neck above the Walnut Street Bridge. They then proceeded to shoot at him. ...
Johnson was not the only black man to have been lynched on the bridge. Thirteen years before Johnson was murdered, Chattanooga native Alfred Blount was murdered there in 1893 after he was abducted from the jail on the night of his arrest by another white lynch mob.
Johnson and Bount were two of more than 4,000 black people who were reportedly lynched in the states of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia between the years 1877 and 1950, according to a 2015 report by the Equal Justice Initiative.
Back in 2000, Johnson’s conviction was posthumously overturned by Chattanooga judge Douglas A. Meyers. ?Something I don’t believe the white community really understands is that, especially at that time, the object was to bring in a black body, not necessarily the person who had committed the crime,” Meyers said during the proceedings in a downtown court room, as The New York Times reported at the time. “And I think that’s what happened in this case. There was a rush to find somebody to convict and blame for this." ...
While the upcoming memorial is dedicated to Johnson and his attorneys—who were among the first black attorneys to appear before the Supreme Court— the space is intended to symbolize other forgotten lynching victims as well.
“They indicate that this is not a finished story—not for Chattanooga or our country,” as Martin tells Foumberg.
Extract from the Original article by Julissa Treviño , in SmartNews .
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There's progress... Statues to the memory of hatred are being taken down, and statues honoring the victims of that hatred are being raised.