BSC student helps tell the stories of Jefferson County lynching victims

Across the South from the 1850s to the early 1960s, countless African Americans lost their lives to racial violence. Now a BSC student has played a role in bringing their untold stories to light.

Alexis Nail Portrait Last fall, a team of local college students set out to research victims of lynchings and other attacks during that era here in Jefferson County, Ala. Birmingham-Southern College junior Alexis Nail, a political science major, human rights minor, and Distinction in Leadership Studies student from Gadsden, was part of the effort by the Jefferson County Memorial Project (JCMP).

She and her team members, most of them JCMP fellows from colleges around the county, released a report Feb. 27 that details the lives of 30 residents who were murdered by lynching, white mobs, and other forms of racial terror. The 48-page report was the result of months of guided research.

“The project has given me a greater understanding of why it’s important to address the ghosts of America’s past,” said Nail. “It helps to gain more insight about our current society so we can create a better future.”

The work was inspired by the Equal Justice Initiative’s groundbreaking lynching memorial in Montgomery, which opened in April to global acclaim. The National Memorial for Peace and Justice includes monuments matching the 800+ counties where violent incidents occurred; the JCMP is working to bring that monument to Birmingham, and the report is the first step.

Nail, the only student participant from BSC, joined JCMP’s research project in September of 2018. She served as a Hess Fellow advocacy intern at the Alabama Appleseed Center in Montgomery for Law and Justice in the summer of 2018, where she made her initial connections with staff at the EJI. Working under the direction of JCMP Project Director Abigail Schneider, she helped research lynching victims, created material for community partner groups on the work that JCMP is doing, and delegated tasks.

“The work I’ve done at BSC has opened so many doors for me,” Nail said. “I would not have been able to have these opportunities if not for Birmingham-Southern.”

Most research for the project came from databases of historic newspaper archives, she said, which gave the students not only a narrative of events, but also helped them to see the lens through which the media covered the murders. The team also used sites like Ancestry.com to seek out victims’ present-day descendants.

According to the report, which you can read here, the first known Jefferson County lynching victim was Lewis Huston, who was dragged and hanged in Linn Park after being accused of assaulting a white woman in November 1883. The last known recorded death in the county occurred in 1940 when O.D. Henderson was killed by a Fairfield police office after a white coworker complained that Henderson bumped into him and knocked him down.

“The research itself was challenging due to the lack of records for many of the victims, beyond what was reported in the newspapers,” said Nail. “It was also emotionally challenging, and that for me, was the biggest burden to bear. It’s already hard to read about the details of a person’s horrendous murder, but when you take into consideration how many were potentially innocent victims and see how they were characterized by the news, it’s both infuriating and heartbreaking.”

She is optimistic, however, that all of their hard work will make a difference.

“Though these men and women weren’t able to get the justice they deserved, I’m hopeful that the JCMP’s future monument will in some way demonstrate that though these lynching victims’ lives didn’t matter then, they matter now,” Nail said.