Revealing lynching sites in North Carolina and South Carolina
A Red Record documents lynchings in the American South, starting with North Carolina. The title, A Red Record, is drawn from Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s work by the same name and is intended, in a small way, to recognize Wells-Barnett’s remarkable courage and commitment to justice. Our research also corroborates Wells-Barnett’s core argument–that lynching was much more than just a response to crime. It was part of a narrative of white supremacy that sought to write out Black success, Black families, and Black personhood.
Monroe Nathan Work was born in 1866 in Iredell County, NC, to parents who were farmers and former slaves. His father moved them to Illinois and then onto their own farm in Sumner County, Kansas. Monroe had opportunities to pursue his career: graduating high school in Arkansas City, then a pastor in Wellington, then a farmer in Oklahoma. Faced with racism in the late 1890s, he was denied a teaching job. So made his way to Chicago to pursue his own educational dream.
The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States
by Wells-Barnett, Ida B., 1862-1931
HON. FREDERICK DOUGLASS'S LETTER
DEAR MISS WELLS:
Let me give you thanks for your faithful paper on the lynch abomination
now generally practiced against colored people in the South. There has
been no word equal to it in convincing power. I have spoken, but my word
is feeble in comparison. You give us what you know and testify from actual knowledge. You have dealt with the facts with cool, painstaking fidelity, and left those naked and uncontradicted facts to speak for themselves.
Brave woman! you have done your people and mine a service which can
neither be weighed nor measured. If the American conscience were only half alive, if the American church and clergy were only half Christianized, if American moral sensibility were not hardened by persistent infliction of outrage and crime against colored people, a scream of horror, shame, and indignation would rise to Heaven wherever your pamphlet shall be read.
But alas! even crime has power to reproduce itself and create conditions
favorable to its own existence. It sometimes seems we are deserted by
earth and Heaven--yet we must still think, speak and work, and trust in
the power of a merciful God for final deliverance.
Very truly and gratefully yours,
FREDERICK DOUGLASS
Cedar Hill, Anacostia, D.C.
The National Memorial for Peace and Justice
The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which opened to the public on April 26, 2018, is the nation’s first memorial dedicated to the legacy of enslaved black people, people terrorized by lynching, African Americans humiliated by racial segregation and Jim Crow, and people of color burdened with contemporary presumptions of guilt and police violence.
NC Highway Historical Marker Program
The North Carolina Highway Historical Marker Program ... one of the oldest such programs in continuous operation in the United States, our highway markers program has been providing passers-by with "history on a stick” since 1935.
If you've seen one of more than 1,600 silver and black markers on the side of road emblazoned with the state seal, then you've interacted with our Highway Historical Markers Program.
Markers commemorate historically significant statewide places, people and events, and cover an array of subjects including schools, churches, battles, generals, artists, poets, preachers, musicians and civil rights.