Congressman Steve Cohen (TN-09) today spoke at the Natural Resources Subcommittee on National Parks, Forests, and Public Lands legislative hearing, advocating his Evaluating Lynching Locations (ELL) for National Park Sites Act, which would direct the National Park Service to study lynching sites within 100 miles of Memphis for possible inclusion in our park system. The bill is named after Mr. Ell Persons, who lived near the site of where the decapitated body of a 16- year-old white girl was found in the outskirts of Memphis in 1917. Persons was arrested twice, interrogated twice, and released twice before being arrested a third time and beaten into confessing to the crime.
Congressman Cohen also recommended to the subcommittee and welcomed hearing witness Richard Watkins, a Memphis lawyer who is the Board President of the Lynching Sites Project of Memphis.
In his remarks, Congressman Cohen described the “white terrorism” that occurred throughout the South in the roughly 100 years after the Civil War, and continued:
“Some of it happened in my hometown of Memphis and my county of Shelby County. There are sites where we know people were lynched and it was illegal and wrong…Until we remind people of our past we will not overcome it and we will not have a better society. We need to recognize the errors of our past. We’re not a perfect society. We are, according to our Constitution, trying to become a more perfect union…What has happened needs to be taught.”
See that statement here.
During his exchange with hearing witnesses, Congressman Cohen received assurances from Kym A. Hall, the National Capital Regional Director of the National Park Service, to work with him on his bill.
See the Congressman’s questions here.
In his testimony, Watkins said, “This legislation will help shine the light of truth on what happened on sites like the Ell Persons site....places associated with events that have made a significant contribution to and are identified with broad national patterns of Civil Rights in our history. An understanding and appreciation of those patterns may be gained by further study.”
Watch his full testimony and his exchange about the importance of the bill with Congressman Paul Tonko (D-NY-20) .
Original source can be found here.
