Alamance County Community Remembrance Coalition member Loy Campbell said that it will be impossible to recover from the Jim Crow era of racial injustice if it’s not talked about. Campbell said understanding how we got here is essential for finding a way to live in a society that is free from racial terror.
“It’s not an effort to punish America or make people feel bad, but it’s an effort to think about what we have done, and how can we move forward towards a place of true justice,” Campbell said.
After almost 7 years of bringing stories of Alamance County’s past to light, the coalition has helped educate the community about three racial lynchings in the county’s past. Campbell said that the goal is to educate others about the lynchings of Wyatt Outlaw, William Puryear and John Jeffries. The coalition has many projects aimed at educating the community about the lynchings. One example is their soil collection project, where they collected soil from the site, or as close as they could get, of each lynching. The soil is preserved in the African-American Cultural Arts and History Center in Burlington…