Nationwide — For years many African Americans have been deprived of learning their real history and how systematic racism has played a significant part in our lives for over 400 years. We have relied on a system that has enslaved us to tell the real stories of violence, race, and generations of injustice, whether it was in schools, churches, or courtrooms. For years, advocate researchers tried to tell the stories of the atrocities that African Americans have experienced and they were always told that these stories were too dark to tell.
In 2019, researchers from 2 Dark 2 Tell traveled to Shubuta, Mississippi, and researched the infamous hanging bridge where several African Americans were hung, which two pregnant sisters and four young men were hung from the bridge in 1918. They arranged a meeting with an 88-year old man who was one of the last people to know about the lynching of Ernest Green and Charles Langley in 1948. When they walked into the restaurant where the meeting was to take place, the elderly gentleman stood up and walked out saying “that was a long time ago and I don’t want to talk about it.” They felt compassion in their hearts for the elderly gentleman, which one researcher stated, “It’s sad that he is going to die fearing something that we would’ve protected him from.”
