The legacy of lynching

[MountainLaurel]

Some incredibly powerful stories in here:

It was like a family reunion, except that the people sharing food and fellowship in a makeshift dining room at the U. S. Capitol were not related.

They were bonded instead by a common history -- a heritage of pain born when their ancestors were beaten, tortured, burned at the stake and hanged.

They were descendants of lynching victims.

"My first reaction, seeing the other descendants, was a little like surprise, because for some reason, I had always thought that my family was in a vacuum, that this was something that had happened to just us," said Betty Greene of Detroit, whose great-uncle Richard Puckett was lynched in Laurens, S.C., in 1913. "To see how many other people and families had been affected, and in all the different ways, was very powerful."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/22/AR2005062201227.html