Warning: The following account contains graphic descriptions that may
trigger some readers. Discretion is advised.

Friend, 

It was a muggy Monday in 1964 and as darkness fell, Jacksonville,
Florida, was ablaze with racial unrest. On a grassy roadside far
from the tumult, Johnnie Mae Chappell was searching for her wallet.

The housekeeper and midwife must have been tired. A Black woman of 35,
Chappell had been cleaning houses since early morning. At home were
six of her 10 children. Her husband, Willie, was headed to his second
job of the day.

And her wallet had fallen out of her grocery bag.

That is why Chappell and two neighbors were looking down at the ground
when a dark blue Plymouth slowed beside them. Out an open window, one
of four young white men inside thrust a .22-caliber pistol and pulled
the trigger. The bullet sped into Chappell's abdomen and killed
her.

What happened that night, March 23, 1964, is straightforward. A white
man killed a Black woman. But everything else about Chappell's
killing is twisted, a random death entwined, like countless others
during the civil rights struggle across the American South, in a
labyrinth of racism, corruption and injustice.

Today, Chappell's name is found among dozens of others on a wall
at the Southern Poverty Law Center's Civil Rights Memorial
Center, each a testament to people whose lives were taken in racially
motivated violence during the modern American civil rights movement
from 1954 to 1968. Black lives did not matter to those who held power
in the violent Jim Crow South. Their deaths have searing resonance
today.

"These are stories that are not often told, but there is a
direct line from the murder of a Johnnie Mae Chappell to the killing
of an Ahmaud Arbery, a George Floyd, a Breonna Taylor," said
Tafeni English, director of the Civil Rights Memorial Center.

"These were citizens targeted because of the color of their
skin," English said. "They were murdered because of a
society shaped by slavery, by Jim Crow, by racial injustice that
persists today."

The Civil Rights Memorial, a circular black granite slab created by
Vietnam Veterans Memorial designer Maya Lin and installed at the
SPLC's headquarters in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1989, is
inscribed with the names of 40 civil rights martyrs and chronicles the
history of the movement in lines radiating outward. Water emerges from
the center of the slab and flows evenly across it, like the mighty
stream of righteousness famously invoked by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

The martyred

The wall of "The Forgotten" is a newer companion to the
memorial. It is part of the interpretive center built by the SPLC in
2005 to tell deeper stories about not only those on the original
memorial but also the civil rights movement itself. In 2000,
Chappell's family approached the SPLC with a request to honor
her memory. The SPLC held a rededication ceremony for the memorial
that year in Chappell's name.

Still evolving with more names, the wall is a living memorial,
designed as a journey of reckoning. In recent decades, as prosecutors
across the South began resurrecting unresolved racial killings -
from the Birmingham church bombing that killed four young Black girls
to the assassination of Medgar Evers - the SPLC joined in that
struggle. And at its headquarters, the Civil Rights Memorial Center
bears witness.

It bears witness to Willie Edwards Jr., a truck driver for a grocery
store in Montgomery. Mistaken on Jan. 23, 1957, for another Black man
who was dating a white woman, Edwards was forced at gunpoint by four
Klansmen to jump off a bridge into the Alabama River to his death.

It bears witness to Cpl. Roman Ducksworth Jr., a military police
officer stationed in Maryland on leave to visit his sick wife on April
9, 1962, when he was ordered off a bus by a police officer and shot
dead. The officer may have mistaken Ducksworth for one of the
"freedom riders" who were testing bus desegregation laws.

It bears witness to Virgil Lamar Ware, 13, riding on the handlebars of
his brother's bicycle in Birmingham on Sept. 15, 1963, when he
was fatally shot by white teenagers. The white youths had come from a
segregationist rally held hours after the Sixteenth Street Baptist
Church bombing.

And it bears witness to Willie Brewster, on his way home from work on
July 18, 1956, when he was shot and killed by white men. The men
belonged to the National States Rights Party, a violent neo-Nazi group
whose members had been involved in church bombings and murders of
Black people.
The march for justice continues

By honoring those and so many more, the SPLC pays tribute to its
guiding principle that the fight against injustice is not over.

Justice never came for Johnnie Mae Chappell. Her death was not
investigated for five months, and then only after two white detectives
picked up the case on their own, defying their superiors by asking
uncomfortable questions. Eventually, despite significant resistance,
the detectives brought four suspects in for questioning. 

Read more here.

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In solidarity,
 
The Southern Poverty Law Center

 

 


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