Some asked, ‘Does Chattanooga need a lynching memorial?’
In 2018, Georgia-based artist Jerome Meadows was selected for a formidable project: a work of public art memorializing Black victims of lynching for permanent display in a bustling section of Chattanooga, a majority-white, Southern city with a dark history of racial violence. The memorial, to be unveiled this weekend, specifically honors Ed Johnson, a Black man who was hanged from the citys Walnut Street Bridge by a lynch mob in 1906. Johnson had been wrongfully convicted of raping a white woman and sentenced to death. After the U.S. Supreme Court ordered a stay of his execution, a mob broke into Johnsons cell and hanged him from the nearby bridge. Johnsons murder led to the first and
In 2018, Georgia-based artist Jerome Meadows was selected for a formidable project: a work of public art memorializing Black victims of lynching for permanent display in a bustling section of Chattanooga, a majority-white, Southern city with a dark history of racial violence. The memorial, to be unveiled this weekend, specifically honors Ed Johnson, a Black man who was hanged from the citys Walnut Street Bridge by a lynch mob in 1906. Johnson had been wrongfully convicted of raping a white woman and sentenced to death. After the U.S. Supreme Court ordered a stay of his execution, a mob broke into Johnsons cell and hanged him from the nearby bridge. Johnsons murder led to the first and