Road Marker Honoring Lynching Victim Unveiled In Alabama
December 8, 2024
Mosley was killed after a white woman accused him of burying her alive, sparking a mob of over 500 white citizens.
A historical marker in honor of Robert Mosley, an 1890 victim of a lynching in Huntsville, Alabama, when he was just 16, was unveiled on Dec. 7, a collaborative effort between the Madison County Remembrance Project and the Equal Justice Initiative.
According to WAFF, Mosley was murdered for allegedly committing what was described as an outrage of modesty, the same kind of violation of white supremacist social norms prevalent in the Jim Crow South that also resulted in Emmett Till’s murder nearly 60 years later in Mississippi.
David Person, a co-founder of the Madison Remembrance Project, told the outlet that the installation is part of a larger effort to install markers near where at least 10 people have been lynched in the Alabama county.
“Our objective is to try to commemorate all of those lives so we hope to be able to see markers installed in the proximity of those events over the course of the next several years,” Person said.
Carl Cooney, a member of the Prince Hall Masons of Alabama, emphasized the importance of preserving and sharing stories that might otherwise fade into history, no matter how difficult or dark those stories may be.
“What happened here and in other places around Huntsville, it was wrong. Simply put, it was wrong,” Cooney Jr told WAFF. “It was a bad spot on our American history, however each one we remember, each one that we commemorate places us a step further as a country and garners more togetherness.”
According to Person, getting the monument erected was quite the collaborative task.
“It’s a culmination of seven years of hard work for something we think has enormous value,” Person said. “[It’s] something we believe will not only document a horrible historic occurrence but also give us an opportunity as a community to reckon with these kinds of evils hopefully in a way that will prevent them from happening in the future to anybody.”
According to Fox 54, Mosley was killed after a white woman accused him of burying her alive, sparking a mob of over 500 white citizens. The mob carried out a brutal act of vigilante justice, typical of lynchings in America, by hanging Mosley from a tree and discarding his body nearby.
According to an analysis of lynchings in America by the Equal Justice Initiative, “The act and threat of lynching became ‘primarily a technique of enforcing racial exploitation—economic, political, and cultural.’ Characterized by Southern mob violence intended to reestablish white supremacy and suppress Black civil rights through political and social terror, the Reconstruction era was a violent period in which tens of thousands of people were killed in racially and politically motivated massacres, murders, and lynchings.”
Donald Yamamoto-McCrary, a resident of Huntsville who learned about the atrocity of what happened to Mosley from the marker, indicated that he believes that healing for the community can only take place if a wound is acknowledged in the first place.
“I think the best way to heal the wound is to actually have something like this,” Yamamoto-McCrary told Fox 54. “It needs to be put back on the operating table. It needs to be addressed. More people need to know about it.”
He continued, “You can’t enjoy the light without the darkness. You can’t enjoy the good history without knowing the bad history. We need to start at the micro level. Be kind to your neighbor, regardless of who your neighbor is, regardless of what color they are, what is their national origin.”
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