“It seems that many Americans, especially white Americans, either don't know much about lynchings or are reticent to discuss it,” Oliver Clasper, a London-born photographer and journalist, says via email. Clasper has set out to provoke a conversation with a project he calls The Spaces We Inherit. In photographs and interviews, he is documenting historic sites where African Americans were terrorized and murdered by white neighbors, and how individuals living in the orbit of this buried past are affected by it today.
With logistical support from the NAACP and the Equal Justice Initiative, as well as research assistance from the Lynching Sites Project of Memphis and others, Clasper has pinpointed and photographed 10 sites so far, in Alabama, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Arkansas. That is only a small fraction of the 4,000-plus known lynchings that have occurred throughout the U.S. since the 19th century. But Clasper’s selections testify to the breadth of circumstances and historic moments in which racially-fueled, extra-judicial killings occurred—and the silence and obscurity into which they’ve often been cast. [...]
“There's certainly this notion that lynchings occurred in the distant past, but that's not the case,” says Clasper. In many cases, the town squares, roadsides, and neighborhood streets where these atrocities took place still exist—and remain unmarked, more often than not. [...]
Though Clasper does not advocate for one approach or another, he was inspired after learning about the work of the Equal Justice Initiative, an Alabama-based civil rights organization dedicated to ending mass incarceration and “excessive punishment” in the United States. As part of EJI’s research on the history that shaped racial injustices in those systems today, volunteers have been collecting soil from scores of lynching sites throughout the South. Those bottles have already been exhibited at EJI headquarters, and represent a kind of preamble to a national lynching memorial the organization is currently raising funds to build outside Montgomery, Alabama. The design is composed of 800 heavy columns—one for every county where a lynching has been documented.
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