Bryan Stevenson

And when people go to these sites, we ask them to put soil from the lynching site in a jar that has the name of the victim and the date.

And they bring it back to the museum.

And so when you come to our museum, you see these jars of soil.

A couple of years back, an older black woman called and said, oh, Mr. Stevenson, I want to dig some soil for your museum.

Do you have a county where no one has done anything?

And we did.

So we asked her to go to this county, and she told me when she got there that she had to pray before she got out of her car because it was this really scary place.

It was a dirt road in the middle of the woods.

And we'd given her the jar with the name of the victim and a memo that talked about the lynching and an implement.

And she said she found her strength, got out of the car, crossed the dirt road, got to the spot where the lynching took place, got down on her knees.

And then she said, this pickup truck came down the road and there was this big white guy in the truck and he stared at her as he drove by.

And she said she was afraid.

Then he stopped, turned his truck around, drove back by and stared some more.

And then she said to her heart, the man parked his truck, got out and started walking toward her.

We tell people when they're digging soil that they don't have to explain what they're doing.

We say, look, if you want to just say you're getting dirt for your garden, that's totally fine.

And this man walked up to her and he said, what are you doing?

And she told me that she was going to tell him she was just getting some dirt from her garden.

She said, but Mr. Stevenson, all of a sudden, something got a hold of me.

And I turned to that man and I said, I'm digging soil here because this is where a black man was lynched in 1937 and I'm going to honor his life today.