Volunteers read more than 4,000 names during all-day event
Dozens of USU students stood silently on the TSC Patio on Monday as names from a list of lynch victims roughly 4,000 names long were read aloud by volunteers.
Coordinated by sociology honors society, Alpha Kappa Delta, the event went from 9 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. in an effort to memorialize lynch victims of several races – primarily black men and women – from throughout American history.
Amy Bailey, a professor in the sociology department, helped coordinate the event by providing the background information and names of the individuals who were honored.
“Racial violence in U.S. history is typically something that most folks don’t know much about – particularly in terms of the scope,” Bailey said. “The individuals who were victimized like this have just largely been lost to history. We really wanted to do something to bring back their personhood and their individuality and recognize that there were individuals who were targeted by mob violence like this.”
Bailey said close to 60 students were involved with publicity, data entry and volunteer work for the event. Volunteer readers read the names, races, dates and locations of lynch victims as well as what they were accused of, with each name reading lasting about 15 to 20 seconds.
Myles Hart, a student volunteer, said, “It’s a good thing that they’re trying to do. They’re trying to raise people’s awareness and educate people on who was lynched and some of the silly reasons that they were lynched.”
Bailey said Monday’s reading event was the second she knows of – the first event she participated in, as a researcher, was held at the University of Washington in 2008. She said the research project there built a database of lynch victims based on historical census reports.
“I think that through the process of working so closely with this kind of information about people who’ve been victimized, we really, at that point, wanted to do something to honor them and recognize what they had gone through,” she said.
Bailey said she thought it would be great to host a memorial for lynch victims at USU.
“It just seemed like it would be a great thing to replicate that event here, and we’ve also been able to incorporate information from other sources,” Bailey said. “So we’re actually expanding the geographical representation of lynch victims.”
Bailey said the highest concentration of lynchings historically took place in the South, and lynch victims were typically black males, but there was also a high rate of incidents in the West.
“Just from California, we’ve got 300 lynch victims,” she said. “It looks like a couple of hundred in Colorado. This was not something that left Western states untouched.”
Groups stigmatized and disadvantaged in the West, she said, included workers coming from China, Native Americans, Mexicans and also white ethnic groups, such as Italians and Jews.
In order to technically qualify as a lynch victim, as determined by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, targeted individuals had to have died at the hands of three or more individuals with some kind of a reference to tradition, honor or prevailing social norms, Bailey said.
By that definition, lynching incidents have been traced back to colonial days in 1850, and the latest occurrences happened around 1990, she said.
Many incidents in which victims escaped or were rescued are not documented as lynchings, she said, though the violence in those cases was just as extreme.
The scope of racial violence is quite under-represented, and 15 percent of victims are also unknown, but the readings bring awareness to the extent of lynching incidents, she said.
Elisa Barfuss, an undeclared freshman, said her sociology class helped volunteer for the event.
“It just made me really sad,” Barfuss said about the number of lynch victims. “It kind of reminded me of all of the racism that was going on back then, and … I wanted to get the word out so that others can see what has happened and want to help others, too.”
Barfuss said racism and lynching aren’t excluded to the past, and students should be more active in preventing such things.
“It’s not as bad as it was then, but it’s still kind of showing up periodically, and we need to just learn that everyone’s the same no matter what,” Barfuss said. “We all are here together, and we should learn to be friends.”
Samantha Averett, a freshman majoring in law and constitutional studies, said she was curious about the event and also attended it with her sociology class.
“It was a beautiful day, and then I walked by here, and I kind of got this dreadful feeling,” Averett said. “It just made me feel helpless, like I kind of wanted to do something, but it’s in the past. I guess all I can do now is hope that it doesn’t happen ever again.”
Averett said the purpose of the event was primarily to raise awareness and prevent racism and hatred from occurring in the future.
“I think it’s really important that students go to these events, because I think they should be educated on these things,” she said. “And a lot of people aren’t aware or they are just ignorant to it, and they don’t realize that it happened or it could happen.”
Bailey said raising awareness of American history is important to preventing racial violence in the future.
“I think part of being Americans is having a full understanding of our history, and that requires a mature understanding of our national history, which is not always as positive and honorable as we might like it to be,” Bailey said.
“I think that this event really gives students an opportunity, first of all, to learn about it, and, building on that, they’ll think about why we have such a violent history in our country, why we have thought at different times in our history that it was OK to violently target people who were different than we were.”
It is important for students to be more accepting of individuals within and outside of their communities, and the diversity of Utah gives them that opportunity, she said.
“Utah is rapidly diversifying, racially and ethnically, and I think that having a gut-level understanding of where people from different groups and different communities are coming from is really helpful for students as they live in their neighborhoods (and) work in their workplaces,” Bailey said. “I think it’s an important perspective to have, to be able to understand where people from other groups are coming from.”
– ariwrees@gmail.com