THE REMEMBRANCE PROCESS
The mission of Community Remembrance Project of Greenville, SC is to honor the lives and memories of victims of racial terror and preserve the social memory of our local community by engaging in a more honest conversation about the history of racial injustice in Greenville County through restorative truth-telling and healing.
The Community Remembrance Project of Greenville County, SC, was formed in the spring of 2019 in collaboration with the Equal Justice Initiative’s (EJI) work to bring the discussion of race and racial injustice in America into the forefront of our society. EJI launched the Community Remembrance Project to help communities around the country to remember and address the legacy of slavery, lynching, and racial segregation that still impacts communities to this day.
Following the protocol established by the Equal Justice Initiative, the CRP has collected soil at each of Greenville County’s four lynching sites for eventual display in exhibits bearing the victims’ names. In addition, we have erected historical markers in public locations within Greenville County that describe the devastating violence.
Throughout this process, we have also conducted a series of community awareness events to educate the public about the truth of lynching in Greenville County. At each of our community events, we provide opportunities for important dialogue. Once we have completed the work of memorializing each of the four victims, we will retrieve Greenville County’s memorial stone—which currently rests at EJI’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama.
The CRP is set to unveil an exhibit at the Upcountry History Museum which will house the four jars of soil starting in the summer of 2024.
