The unacknowledged lynching history of a place lies buried in its very soil

Evidence

The experience was only intensified when I saw the monument of Jackson County, Mississippi, the place where I was born and raised. Eight people had been lynched there. Throughout my childhood, I never heard that such a horrendous thing had happened, never mind happened eight times, anywhere near my home. I knew none of the names. Staring at the monument, I understood a bit better my dad’s claim that he doesn’t “do white people.” Why would he? As the jars of dirt at the museum had made plain, the places we live are often, though not always, landscapes layered with the violence of generations. It is in the soil that nurtures us even when we can’t see it on the surface. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Begin Again, 554

Categorization

• XREF: Personalizes the reader’s ‘after times’ thesis: the author’s own education never revealed eight local lynchings — a failed reckoning encoded into upbringing. — connects to: A place becomes haunted by being stained with a singular intense year — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 483
• SHARE: The image of 800 corten-steel monument ‘coffins that look like rusted coffins’ and the jars of soil from lynching sites would strike anyone working on memory and place.