The National Lynching Memorial opened this week in Montgomery, Alabama. If you search online, you will find the report produced by the Equal Justice Initiative (the people behind the memorial) which gives us the history of lynching in painful detail.
From 1877 to 1950, there were 233 lynchings in Tennessee.
While Shelby County led the state with 20 lynchings, Davidson County had 6 lynchings in that time period. Robertson County was the 4th highest with 11. Williamson and Sumner had 5, Rutherford 4 and Cheatham & Wilson County with one.
There is a steel monument hanging in the memorial engraved with the names of the six African Americans lynched in Davidson County, Tennessee. There is one with 11 names from Robertson, 5 from Williamson and Sumner, 4 from Rutherford and 1 from Cheatham & Wilson County. There is another copy of that monument laying in the park that surrounds the memorial waiting to be claimed by the people of Davidson County, Robertson, Sumner, Wilson, Rutherford, Williamson & Cheatham Counties. We’ve attached a video from the people who created this Memorial explaining why there was a need for this memorial.
