Read the Jefferson County Memorial Project’s inaugural report, “Jefferson County’s 30 Residents,” for information about the project and stories on the 30 lynching victims in the county.
The Birmingham City Council will hold three evening meetings this year in an effort to increase accessibility and transparency at City Hall. In a unanimous vote Tuesday, the council approved a measure spearheaded by District 1 Councilor Clinton Woods to hold one meeting per quarter at 5:30 p.m. starting in April. The evening meetings, Woods said, would allow members of the public whose schedules cannot accommodate the council’s regularly scheduled 9:30 a.m. meeting time. Read more.
“This report will be hard to read:” Jefferson County Memorial Project Puts the Spotlight on Lynchings, and There’s More to Come Researching Birmingham’s Lynchings was Disturbing, Eye-Opening for College Students Who Took on the Project How They Did It: College Students Were
The Jefferson County Memorial Project focused on incidents that occurred between 1883 and 1940. Killings were defined as lynchings if they were an act of racial terrorism by white mobs of three or more people, whether they were killed by hanging, burning, mutilating, shooting or other forms of assault. There were more incidents not included
Read more about the Jefferson County Memorial Project at the group’s website.
Students at colleges in the Birmingham area researched lynchings of 30 victims, including facts they found mostly in government documents and press reports, along with some of their impressions of the situations. Here are a few of the victims’ stories. Read more.
Lewis Houston was accused of assaulting a white woman and arrested by police. Rumors swirled about plans to lynch him. A mob of white men began to gather outside the jail. On Saturday evening, Nov. 24, 1883, a mob of 150 men approached the jail to apprehend Lewis. The mob of men broke into the jail with pistols and took Mr. Houston from his cell. The mob dragged Mr. Houston from Fourth Avenue North to Capitol Park, now known as Linn Park. The mob took Mr. Houston to a pine tree in the park and told him to confess to raping the woman. Lewis responded, “Gentleman, before God, I didn’t do it.” Following this, the mob adjusted the rope around his neck. His last words were “Jesus, take me home.” Read more.
Before college students recruited to research lynchings for the Jefferson County Memorial Project could start their work, they had to go through training on finding information and interpreting it. As their work began in earnest, students gathered at the Linn-Henley Research Library in downtown Birmingham for a primer in archival research. “It’s hard to uncover information about people from a long time ago,” said Devyne Troy, a student at Miles College. “(The JCMP) taught us the best avenues to find birth certificates and death certificates. They gave us an outline of what public records you could possibly obtain and what records would be more strenuous to get. And they taught us about microfilm.” Read more.
“My whole life, I knew there was segregation,” Jimena Ortiz-Perez said. “I knew (lynching) happened. But I only knew the surface.” Ortiz-Perez, a student at Lawson State Community College, is one of 21 college and graduate student fellows who wrote the Jefferson County Memorial Project’s “30 Victims” report, which provides an in-depth look at each of the county’s lynching victims from 1883 to 1940. It was a process that students said was equally harrowing and revelatory. “Just the things that happened here in Birmingham, not too far from where I currently live, it’s like, ‘Whoa, this actually happened?’” Ortiz-Perez said. “It makes you look at the progress we have made, but at the same time, have we actually progressed enough? ... It’s like a wake-up call for me.” As the JCMP began its work on the report, it reached out to all six colleges in Jefferson County for student volunteers. “We were really intentional about making sure that this was an intergenerational, interfaith, interracial organization, because that’s really important, we think, to changing the historical memory of a county and having the grassroots cohesiveness to really advocate for change,” project director Abigail Schneider said. Some students say they joined the project because they were already interested in studying inequality. Amber Somma, a biology major at UAB, said she found out about the project through a mass email mistakenly sent to her department — but she found herself drawn to help anyway. “I’m someone who is into these social justice-type things. … So that’s why I decided to do this. I just wanted to get that story out.” Read more.
On November 16, 1890, a mob of white men lynched Henry Smith. The following day, an unknown black man created a protest against this act of racial terror. That night, on November 17, 1890, a group of men lynched this unknown man. No more is known about his age, family, or occupation or about where the incident occurred.
