York County Community Remembrance Project
Our Mission is to seek to commemorate and honor victims of racial terror, to preserve the history of our community, and to promote healing and understanding through open conversation.
Our Vision is a community that understands and honors our racial history.
WHO WE ARE
The York County Community Remembrance Project is a coalition of diverse members from York County, South Carolina. We are a community partner of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), located in Montgomery, Alabama. EJI supports the efforts of counties to memorialize documented victims of racial violence and to educate communities about the history of racial injustice. The EJI Community Remembrance projects focus specifically on racial terror lynching because of its brutality and its use to control the Black community. We believe it is critical for communities to do the difficult work of unearthing and confronting their own histories of racial injustice and violence, while exploring how that history continues to shape the present.
What We Do
The remembrance process includes conducting research using original sources, determining the location of the lynchings, locating living descendants of victims, and conducting memorial and educational events around each instance. To date, the York County Community Remembrance Project has documented the lynchings of 10 Black men in our county.
Telling the stories of these men and framing them in the historical context of the time is central to our work. There are three phases of remembrance for each lynching. In Phase One, we will conduct a soil collection on the site of the lynching and will memorialize the men in a public event. In Phase Two, an educational exhibit using the soil collected will be displayed in a public area. In Phase Three, a permanent marker will be erected on the site.
We are in Phase One of our project.
Our Current Project
Our current research indicates that 10 Black men were lynched without trial in York County in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As our first project, we will be telling the story of the 1887 lynching of five men who were lynched together. Giles Good, Bailey Dowdle, Mose Lipscomb, Daniel Roberts, and Prindley Thompson. They were accused of killing a white child named Johnnie Lee Good. No trial was held for these men and no evidence was provided. Instead, they were broken out of the York jail by a large mob of white men and hung from two trees on what is now West Liberty Street in York, South Carolina. One of these men, Giles Good, was a former soldier in the Black Militia during the Civil War and Reconstruction, and a leader in the black community during and after Reconstruction.
