One murder’s economic fallout rippled across generations of a Black family

Evidence

Less than two years later, the family fled Lowndes County in the dark of night, fearing for their lives. They found refuge in Montgomery, where Bertha Mae was employed in domestic work. Over the next few decades the family would remain financially and emotionally adrift. Eventually, some of the Bollings were drawn north by the Great Migration, while others joined the military and went overseas. There were marriages and divorces, births and deaths. Yet there was one consistent force connecting their fates: the rippling effects of Elmore’s murder. No generation would fully escape. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 914

Categorization

• XREF: Directly serves the reader’s case study on how the 1619 reframing traces causal chains of violence through generations; tracks with the ‘deviation vs design’ thread about racial violence being structural, not incidental.