The Lynching Sites Project of Memphis
By: Carla Peacher-Ryan
In 2015, a group of people at First Congregational Church had been having a discussion group about race, like all good liberal churches do, when we learned that Bryan Stevenson, of the Equal Justice Initiative, was coming to a fundraiser in Memphis. Two of our members went and urged us to take up Stevenson’s challenge – to research and memorialize the lynchings that had happened in Shelby County, Tennessee – more than in any other county in Tennessee.
Stevenson’s work regarding lynching grew out of his death-penalty defense practice – he sees the through line from historical lynchings of black people in America to today’s mass incarceration, police killings and the disproportionate impact that the death penalty has on black people, and importantly, how our willful ignorance about, and active covering up, of the history of lynching atrocities perpetuate this cycle.
A research group formed and started meeting in 2016. We were incredibly lucky to find a person who had spent a large part of her professional life studying lynching, Dr. Margaret Vandiver, who joined us and has guided our work from the beginning.
Our first historical marker was in memory of Ell Persons. In May, 1917 the decapitated body of a 16-year-old white girl, named Antoinette Rappel, was found at the old Wolf River Bridge near what is now Summer Ave. Suspicion fell on Ell Persons, an African American woodcutter who lived nearby. Persons was arrested twice, interrogated twice and released twice before being captured a third time and reportedly beaten into a confession.
Upon his capture by a mob, local newspapers announced that he would be burned the next morning. A crowd, estimated at 3,000-5,000, gathered to watch. Vendors set up stands among the crowd and sold sandwiches and snacks. It was reportedly a carnival-like atmosphere. James Weldon Johnson, the author of the lyrics of “Lift Every Voice and Sing” and then the Field Secretary of the national NAACP, came to Memphis to investigate the lynching and said “I tried to balance the sufferings of the miserable victim against the moral degradation of Memphis, and the truth flashed over me that in large measure the race question involves the saving of black America’s body and white America’s soul.”
In May of 2017, on the centennial of the lynching, the Lynching Sites Project of Memphis held a commemoration ceremony at the lynching site attended by several hundred people, including elected officials and clergy. Relatives of both Ell Persons and Antoinette Rappel – the teenager he was accused of, but never tried for, murdering – attended this ceremony.
LSP has since installed 3 other historical markers memorializing the lynching of Lee Walker, Name Unknown from 1851, and Wash Henly and another installation is planned in the next year for the site of the People’s Grocery lynching of Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell and Will Stewart. We have held a number of commemorations of anniversaries of lynchings at various sites, including the lynching of Jesse Lee Bond in Arlington in 1939. We are working to get the Ell Persons lynching site on the National Historic Register and are coordinating with the Wolf River Conservancy for its inclusion on the Wolf River Greenway that is planned to go near the lynching site. Members of LSP are frequent speakers to school groups, church groups and community groups, and we also conduct tours of the various lynching sites in Shelby County. We have made or contributed to several documentaries, have a podcast, The Red Record, and have an app with information about our markers and the lynchings in Shelby County.
There are also community meetings on the 2nd Monday of each month, which have been held continuously for the last 10 years. The meetings are a time for difficult, courageous conversations and relevant speakers. For more information, please visit our website at lynchingsitesmem.org
Bio:
Carla Peacher-Ryan is a retired attorney from Memphis, Tennessee, who is recognized for her involvement in social justice initiatives. She gained public attention after uncovering her family’s troubling history related to her great-uncle, Paul Peacher, who was convicted of enslaving 13 Black men in 1936 in Arkansas. She has been a member of the Lynching Sites Project since its inception, and is a former Advisory Board member with the Hooks Institute.
