A video I recorded by the courthouse this evening in downtown Jackson, Tennessee.
Video Summary:
On Sunday, July 12, 2026, while traveling through Jackson, Tennessee on the way to Oklahoma, I stopped at the Madison County courthouse to look for a historical marker documenting the county’s history of racial terror lynchings. I found one, part of the Equal Justice Initiative’s Community Remembrance Project, and read it aloud on camera because this history deserves to be seen and remembered, not left in the shadows.
The marker tells the stories of two Madison County lynching victims. Eliza Woods, a Black domestic worker, was accused in August 1886 of poisoning her white employer. That night a mob dragged her from jail to the courthouse, tore off her clothes, hanged her from a tree, and riddled her body with bullets, all while she maintained her innocence. Ida B. Wells, who became one of the nation’s leading anti-lynching crusaders, wrote about Woods’s murder repeatedly in her journalism. Five years later, John Brown, a Black railroad passenger accused (without due process) of injuring a switchman, was taken from jail at midnight by a mob of 500 masked men and lynched in the courthouse yard. Neither Woods nor Brown ever received a trial, and none of the people responsible for killing them ever faced prosecution.
This kind of documentation matters close to home too. In Charlotte, North Carolina, where I live, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Remembrance Project recently dedicated a historical marker at Reedy Creek Park honoring Willie McDaniel, a 22-year-old tenant farmer lynched in 1929. Efforts like this one and the marker in Jackson are part of a growing, nationwide movement to name these acts of terrorism honestly, collect soil from lynching sites, and make sure these stories are no longer erased from local memory.
I’m grateful to the Equal Justice Initiative and to community groups like the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Remembrance Project for the hard work of uncovering and memorializing this chapter of our history. But remembering isn’t only about looking backward. It’s a call to keep affirming due process, to reject vigilante justice, and to confront the ways white supremacy still shapes our nation and our world today. Every person, regardless of race, gender, or identity, is equal in the eyes of the law, and I believe equal in the eyes of God, deserving the same dignity, protection, and justice as any other child of God.
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