As we crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Leticia waved her wand and let hundreds of bubbles waft into the air and over the river below.
“I’m releasing unknown souls,” she told me.
The second photo is of Leticia at the The Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration looking at some of the 800 jars of soil that have been collected from around the country from sites where Black men, women, and children were lynched—beaten, burned, shot, whipped— murdered—for infractions such as drinking from a white man’s well, speaking disrespectfully, protesting low wages, or for writing a note to a white woman.
Researchers from the Equal Justice Initiative documented more than 4,000 racial terror lynchings of African Americans in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia between 1877 and 1950.
Photo cred: Linda Gerber
