After the Civil War, violent resistance to equal rights for Black people led to decades of abuse and exploitation meant to intimidate Black people and enforce racial subordination. The research of our college fellows outlines acts of racial terrorism that lasted for nearly half a century in Jefferson County. This was a national system of terror and oppression that local governments, the press, religious institutions, and businesses were complicit in upholding. These residents were sons and daughters, siblings, and fathers and mothers. They lived through slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the rise of Jim Crow. But, their stories have mostly been lost.
JCMP fellows have taken an important step in researching these histories. 2019 JCMP Fellows researched the 30 documented victims of racial terror violence in Jefferson County. Our 2020 Fellows dove deeper into Birmingham’s local archives, each researching a local newspaper in print during the year of a lynching. They found four more victims and analyzed the greater system of racial terror in our county. In 2021, Fellows looked into the history of Birmingham’s Linn Park and its role throughout the city’s history as a place of both division and unity. Our 2023 research, done in conjunction with the JCDA Emmett Till Cold Case Project, takes us on an exploration of the evolution of the police system and social institutions in Jefferson County, Alabama
