A new, permanent exhibit at the Upcountry History Museum that seeks to shine a light on one of the nation’s darkest periods of racial conflict, was unveiled June 21 .
The exhibit is the culmination of years of work by the Community Remembrance Project of Greenville County to document the four confirmed lynchings that happened in the county between 1881 and 1933.
The new exhibit consists of four containers of soil taken from the sites of the lynchings with details about the events and the men who lost their lives.
The work is in collaboration with the Equal Justice Initiative based in Montgomery, Alabama, and seeks to foster racial justice and reconciliation, in part, through a frank appraisal of the nation’s history of racial violence.
Founded in 2019 to honor the memories of the four lynching victims in Greenville County identified by the Equal Justice Initiative, CRP has hosted a number of community meetings to open a frank dialogue about this dark chapter of South Carolina’s history.
Creating a permanent display has been one of CRP’s primary goals, according to co-chair Ellen Stevenson.
“We were very excited to be able to do this,” she said.
Two jars of soil were collected at each site — one destined for the local exhibit and one sent to become part of a much larger collection at the Equal Justice Initiative Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Stevenson said.
The new soil collection display is in the Upcountry History Museum’s lobby and memorializes the lynching deaths of the following four Black men:
- Robert Williams — Nov. 4, 1881, near Williamston
- Ira Johnson — July 15, 1895, near Greenville
- Tom Keith — Aug. 16, 1899, north of Greenville
- George Green — Nov. 16, 1933, near Taylors
The soil was collected during ceremonies between November 2020 and October 2022 at the approximate sites of the lynchings.
For more information, visit the Community Remembrance Project’s website at remembranceprojectgvlsc.org.
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