A featured story in the Richmond Times-Dispatch on January 20, 2019, titled “Virginia has a dark history of lynching. Efforts are underway to bring it to light,” mentions an important project created by James Madison University’s Gianluca De Fazio working closely with JMU Libraries faculty.
Featured contributor Michael Paul Williams writes, “as we near the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first Africans at Jamestown and what would become the U.S., some Virginians are examining those atrocities,” and Gianluca De Fazio of JMU’s Department of Justice Studies along with Kevin Hegg and Howard Carrier of JMU Libraries are doing just that. They “[have] set up a database that documents 104 lynchings in Virginia from 1877 to 1927 — the year before the General Assembly passed an anti-lynching law.” Hegg and Carrier have been contributing to this project for a few years, with important back-end support provided from JMU Libraries IT.
The story goes on to mention other archives of racial terror and lynching in the Commonwealth of Virginia and explores the implications of these actions in the current political and social climate.
Read the whole article here.
Update: 13 February 2019
This project was specifically mentioned again in two further news outlets: WHSV and The Washington Post.