The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Remembrance Project is part of a national movement to tell the truth about racial terror lynchings in America, to understand how this violent history still shapes our lives today, and to help our community move toward reconciliation.

In partnership with Bryan Stevenson’s renowned Equal Justice Initiative, we tell the stories of Joe McNeely and Willie McDaniel, who were killed in the two racial terror lynchings documented by EJI in Mecklenburg County. We work to memorialize these men by collecting soil from the sites of their deaths, and by erecting historical markers and a monument.

Thousands of Black people across our nation died in racial terror lynchings: hangings, and other forms of killing, used to intimidate entire Black communities. Black people could be lynched for any perceived offense, including violating white social customs, arguing with a white person, or being accused of crime, often without evidence or a fair trial. These lynchings shaped the geographic, political, economic, and social conditions of Black people in ways we still see today — and that America still has not fully addressed.

To change that, we must face this history together, but first we must understand that it happened here.