Greenville: Facing its past

Montgomery, Alabama, is the home of The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, a place dedicated to African Americans who have perished by lynching or fallen victim to other racial injustices. The central memorial is constructed of 800 steel monuments, representing each county in the United States where a racial terror lynching took place. Greenville County is one of the 800 as it is the county of record for the 1933 lynching of George Green by a group of men.

In the six-acre park surrounding the memorial is a field of identical monuments, waiting to be claimed and installed in their respective counties. The monuments gauge the willingness of communities to face the past and take ownership of their part of history.

The Community Remembrance Project of Greenville County, a partnership between Furman University’s Riley Institute Fellows and a long list of community stakeholders, aims to retrieve its monument and plaque. The Greenville Journal covered an event that took place in November to raise awareness of the of the two-year initiative.