Laura head shot.PNG — Laura Faith Kebede

Dear Readers,

The essence of our new "Civil Wrongs" project can be distilled down to one African word:

Sankofa.

It means to look back and retrieve what is at risk of being lost. The word comes from the Akan tribe of Ghana and embodies the importance they place on knowing history. And many Americans feel the same; we must critically examine our past to help us understand our present and inform our decisions for the future.

That’s what we aim to do. Our investigations will examine unsolved and unresolved murders of the civil rights era, lynchings, and racial massacres and analyze their enduring effects. We'll publish what we find in stories that will appear online, on public radio, and television.

For far too long, the truth about racial terror in our nation has been ignored, hidden, or downplayed. But we cannot fully heal without facing it head on.

For example, I was in my mid-20s when I learned what the Lost Cause of the Confederacy was, but I had already experienced its effects. Growing up in a small rural Virginia town nestled between the capitals of the Union and Confederacy, my teachers glossed over the role of slavery and racial terror in the Civil War and beyond.

Relatedly, they often insisted racism was mostly dead and did not have much impact on the present. I did not have the language then to articulate why that was wrong, but the discomfort I felt pushed me to find answers for myself. I’ve been learning ever since.

The cases we plan to investigate in Tennessee and the Mid-South were often trivialized by journalists at the time. Reporters often took officials’ statements without question while disregarding Black voices that dared to complicate the story. This left holes in the narratives that have yet to be fully examined.

On the other extreme, journalists publicized lynchings ahead of time, inviting whole communities to watch racially motivated murders as entertainment.

Yet as a society, we know frighteningly little about these incidents and the impact they had on our communities for generations.

To quote investigative journalist Ida B. Wells, who got her start in Memphis: “The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.”

Will you join us? It’s time we go back and retrieve what is at risk of being lost.

Laura

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Laura Faith Kebede Shares Her Vision For "Civil Wrongs"