Our Goals
Community Education
The goal of community education is to create opportunities to promote public dialogue about the history of racial injustice and racial terror in our community in order to begin the work of repairing the harms caused from an era of enslavement, an era of racial terror lynching and violence, an era of Jim Crow segregation, and an era of mass incarceration. It is our hope and goal that we will create events and spaces for our community to engage in restorative truth-telling that will help us develop stronger community trust and lay the groundwork for building a more equitable Alamance County.
Soil Collection
Collecting soil from the most probable sites of known lynchings is the first public community action in EJI’s process for eventually claiming Alamance County’s memorial. This project includes ongoing education in the community about the lynchings and the context of racial terror in which they were committed. In September 2021, the Coalition held soil collection ceremonies as an acknowledgment and commemoration of the lives and deaths of Wyatt Outlaw, William Puryear, and John Jeffress.
To watch the videos from our soil collection ceremonies, click below.
Historical Marker
Erecting historical markers in our community creates a permanent record of racial terror violence that provides everyone in the community exposure to our shared history of racial injustice. The historical markers provided by EJI detail the narrative events surrounding a specific lynching victim, or group of racial terror lynching victims, and the history of racial terrorism in America.
To watch a video of an EJI historical marker installation, click the button below.
Lynching Memorial
The EJI Museum and Memorial have two copies of the lynching memorial for each county in the country where racial terror lynchings have been documented. The final step of the partnership with EJI involves bringing one of these memorials to Alamance County and erecting it as a lasting reminder of this portion of our shared history as a community.
To learn more about the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, click the button below.