The Greater Terre Haute Chapter of the NAACP began discussions Monday about bringing the Vigo County display from a national lynching memorial to Terre Haute.
Officially the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, the Montgomery, Alabama, site features 800 steel monuments – one for each U.S. county where lynchings of African-Americans are known to have occurred between 1877 and 1950.
The Vigo County monument recognizes a February 1901 incident in which a mob broke into the jail, killed a man named George Ward and hanged his lifeless body from a railroad bridge. The crowd then burned his body on the bank of the Wabash River.
Ward was a suspect in the shooting death of a 20-year-old female school teacher, but the crowd wouldn’t wait for a trial.
NAACP members noted it was incidents such as lynchings and a 1908 race riot in Springfield, Illinois, that led to the founding of their organization.
