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.