 Alright, thank you Jen. Good morning everybody. Uh, great to be with you here today. I'm Neil Romanosky and the Dean of University Libraries. And before we get started, I just wanted to cover. Brief housekeeping notes about our session here on Microsoft Teams today. Jen's going to share a slide with some info on that. So just some tips for a successful virtual session here on teams this morning. You know, if you could please keep your microphones muted until you're directed to unmute during the session. That way we can sure we hear Jordan loud and clear throughout. That's the little microphone symbol at the top there. You can share of your kudos reactions, etc via the chat function today. And that's a circled in blue here on the slide. It's a little bubble icon. You can use the hand raise slash reactions. Button that's the little circular face with the hand up there to notify. Speakers in Jordan today if you want to share and engage without interrupting, of course, we'd love to hear your questions, so please don't hesitate to ask them. You could also use or use reaction buttons there to do applause and other kinds of things. And then there is live captioning available as well for enhanced accessibility and that is the three dots ellipses button circled in yellow here on the slide. We can activate it. So thank you very much, Jen, for that info. And so as I said, I'm Neil Romanoski. I'm the Dean of University Libraries and it is my pleasure to welcome everyone to our graduate research series, which is collaboratively hosted by the University Libraries, Graduate Student Senate, and the Faculty Senate. In the series, it highlights the research process of graduate students sharing not only the substance of their research, but the successes, challenges, and use of information resources that they experience throughout the research process. And the presenters for our series are selected by the Graduate Research Series Committee, which consists of librarians and staff in libraries, as well as Graduate Student Senate. So this morning, I am very pleased to welcome our presenter, Jordan Zinnak, Doctoral Candidate in History. Jordan's presentation, Violence and Memory, Lynching in the Midwestern United States, seeks to answer the question of why lynching Jim Crow laws and black codes are associated with the South, and they were also found in Northern states. Jordan's research stems from a variety of, and her research used a variety of resources, such as the Southeast Ohio History Center, Mountain Zion Baptist Church, and the University Libraries. In the left of the libraries, Jordan worked with Lorraine Walkna, our subject librarian for African American Studies to locate materials pertinent for research. Jordan holds a bachelor's degree in history from the University of Pittsburgh, a master's degree in history from Ohio University, and Jordan's research is in gender and race relations in the United States. So without further ado, I'm very pleased to welcome and introduce Jordan over to you. Thank you so much, Dean Romanoski, for that introduction, and thank you to the Graduate Research Series Committee and Graduate Student Senate for selecting me and giving me the opportunity to present today, and thank you to everyone in the audience that came to my talk to listen. Now let me go ahead and share my screen here and get my PowerPoint presentation up. It's loading. I can see it, Jordan. Perfect, great. Okay, so of course, Dean already said the title of my talk today is Violence and Memory, lynching in the Midwestern United States. Okay, am I frozen? A little bit, yes. Okay, I don't get the best service in my office, so I'm going to shut off my camera just for a little bit to see if it loads a little better. So basically, just to give you a quick outline of what I'm going to talk about today, I'll basically go over the process of my thesis research and how the library resources helped me through that process. My involvement with the Christopher Davis Community Remembrance Project and our collaboration with the People Justice Initiative and my plans to expand my thesis research for my larger dissertation project. And first, I just want to acknowledge that just a few weeks ago, Congress passed the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Bill, making lynching officially a federal hate crime. And it took from 1892 when Ida B. Wells Barnett was the first person to start the anti-lynching campaign until 2022 to get this bill passed through Congress. So it's astounding that it has taken so long, but it does make for a very timely talk today. And let me see if I pop back up. Okay, you should be able to see me and okay. And here's the second slide here. So for my thesis, I use the lynching of Christopher Davis as a case study to exemplify characteristics of lynchings across the United States. And I just want to begin, who was Christopher Davis? He was a 24-year-old Black American farmhand. He had a wife named Kinshia, who he liked to call Issa. And two kids, a three-year-old daughter named Roberty and an infant son named Silas. And he lived in Albany, Ohio, in Lee's Township. And essentially, he was accused of assault of a white woman named Lucinda Lucky, whom he used to work for. And he was lynched on November 21st, 1881. And as he waited trial to present his defense against these charges of assault, 30 to 50 men broke into the jail cell where he was being held, dragged him to the South Bridge, which is around where Baker Center is today on Ohio University's campus, and essentially hanged him from the bridge. Okay. So this project began for me when my advisor, Dr. Katherine Jellison, introduced me to a coalition that was working to commemorate Christopher Davis. This topic seemed to be not very well known. A lot of people didn't really know that this happened right here in Athens, Ohio. And the coalition was kind of searching for a historian to find out more, to find out more about Christopher Davis's life and about the lynching. So it was no better time for me to arrive at OU. I came here in 2018 in the master's program in the history department, and I came in studying race relations and gender. So I was right on board with this topic. This was the perfect time I came here when this coalition was just getting together. So it was right up my alley, and I was very excited to start researching. And Ada Woodson Adams, she is a local genealogist, she's a member of Southeast Ohio History Center, and a member of our coalition, the Christopher Davis Community Remembrance Project. She had already begun doing a little bit of research, and she shared some of her findings with me. And here is a picture of the census records, which is something we just kind of started with just to see descriptions of Christopher Davis. We saw that Lucinda Lucky was his neighbor, the ages of him and his family, and actually he was described as a nulado in this census record, which is a term for a mixed-race person. And you can tell by this portrait here that he does have some very white-looking features, you know, almost as if he could be white passing based on this drawing of him. So when I first arrived in 2018 to OU and the Masters program, I was a little bit unfamiliar on how to navigate Olden Library's resources, so I reached out to the subject librarian for African American Studies, Lorraine Wakna, and she was so helpful to me. She showed me how to navigate the library's databases, you know, to discover which towns reported on this lynching, which databases were best used to search, how to do keyword searches to find reports on the lynching and on Christopher Davis. So she was absolutely helpful and the newspapers that I found through the library's website were just instrumental to my thesis project. I also ordered books through Ohio Link, so Ohio Link is a program that Olden Library has that connects different libraries throughout all of Ohio. So if I needed a book and it wasn't at directly at Olden Library, they would reach out to another library throughout Ohio and order that for me, which was great. I just wanted to do a lot of secondary source reading to establish my credibility on the topic of lynchings throughout the U.S., you know, to become an authority on that subject. Yeah, so the local newspapers I found there were a number of them, some being the Athens Messenger, the Athens Journal, the Logan Hawking Centennial, just to name a few. But I just kept finding biases. The automatic assumption of Christopher Davis's guilt of this crime, and they refer to him as the Black Beast and described the mob's actions as protecting white women and this group of brave, bold men just justifying the mob's actions and defaming Christopher Davis's name, which is a commonality across lynchings throughout the U.S., just the automatic assumption of Black guilt and justification for this extrajudicial murder. So with the pace of Christopher Davis, there was really no formal investigation that took place to look into the crime, no attempts to prove his innocence, and no attempts to look at mob action to punish the members for this murder. So to expand my research and to try to find out a little bit more and dig further, I traveled to Chester Hill, Ohio, to the Multicultural Genealogical Center, and this is just a center where people do research to document and preserve Black history, diverse history, multicultural history. And there, I found the Michelle and Cornelia prairie drool collection, and this was a couple who had met in France, and Cornelia actually got a job working at OU. And the couple worked together to compelate a history of Black Appalachia, and they just left this huge filing cabinet of primary source documents about Black Americans in this area. So searching through those documents, I came across the Mags County Republican, and this was the first document that suggested Davis's innocence of the crime. And Christopher Davis was from Mags County. He grew up there, so it might have been an area where people were more willing to attest to his character. And from these documents, some reasonable doubts started to surface. So just to name a few of the reasonable doubts that I came across, one was that Christopher Davis's neighbors said that he was with, and he was eating dinner with them at their house during the time of the crime. So if he had gotten a chance to go to trial, he could have presented an alibi and presented this as part of his defense against this crime. Another reasonable doubt was that he went to church the next morning, where apparently he learned about the attack on Lucinda Lucky. And you would think that someone who would commit such a heinous crime might have wanted to hide after especially being a Black American would think that he wouldn't go right out into public. But that's just my speculation. It's just my thoughts. And the only thing I can do with this information is speculate. And one of the more prominent reasonable doubts was that Lucinda Lucky stayed with Christopher Davis. Part of her house had burnt down and it was over going renovations. And she stayed with Christopher Davis for weeks. So that suggested to me that there was some kind of comfortability between the two of them that if an assault were to have happened, maybe it would have happened during this time when she stayed with him. And then another reasonable doubt was I found a letter that he had wrote to his wife. And it kind of just stated that he felt that trouble was coming upon him and he just basically said, I'm innocent of the crime, things like that. So there was this back and forth of letters to the editor between Fair Play. So these men, I'm assuming they were men, but Fair Play was a pseudonym and Justice was a pseudonym that they wrote letters to the editor and Fair Play was the one explaining these reasonable doubts and alluding to Christopher Davis's innocence. And Justice was challenging his accusations and saying no, Christopher Davis is guilty. So there was a lot of back and forth within these newspapers. But just either way, the point I'm trying to make guilty or innocent, Davis just should have had a right to a child to present his defense if he were white, he would have had that chance that this murder wouldn't have happened. So basically new information came to the forefront and our coalition was able to tell the complexities behind the lynching of Christopher Davis. And I actually found another document from the 1930s that Sheriff Warden, he was the one who tried to keep Davis and his jail cell tried to prevent the mob's actions, but ultimately failed. He was interviewed in the 1930s and he identified members of the mob and some one person was Lucinda Lucky's son. One was her nephew and one member that he identified actually went on to be a local judge. So this is just showing how people got away with this murder and even got to hold positions of authority within the community. Okay, so partnering with the Equal Justice Initiative, our coalition's leader Sue Riggy, she was the first one to reach out to the Equal Justice Initiative. And what is EJI? It's basically a nonprofit that seeks to provide lawyers for wrongly convicted Black Americans. They work on things like ending mass incarceration, helping find justice for people on death row. And they also like to spread awareness about racial violence throughout the U.S. And one way they do this is by funding markers just to acknowledge victims of lynchings and it's as a way to help educate the public. So basically their respects our coalition had to take to prove our dedication to wanting to commemorate Davis before the Equal Justice Initiative would agree to fund the marker. So the first one of our first steps was having this commemoration ceremony and the soil collection ceremony. And you can see from these middle pictures these jars of soil. So basically we had speakers there from the Equal Justice Initiative, local Black advocates, performers. This bottom left hand corner is Kazia Waters. He is a master's student in the performing arts department and he actually portrayed himself as Christopher Davis. It was a self-performance and just absolutely powerful. We had singers there who sang freedom songs and we had over 300 people in attendance, which was amazing. But basically we had these jars of soil and the community members were able to walk up and we gathered at the lynching site, near the lynching site. And community members were able to walk up and shovel some dirt and soil from the lynching site, which just is a powerful movement and everyone got to kind of participate in this. So one jar of soil went to the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama and you can see these jars of soils. This top left hand corner is the state name with the victims of lynchings listed there. Yes, so one jar of soil went to the Legacy Museum and the other stayed at the Southeast Ohio History Center. I curated a museum exhibit along with members at the Southeast Ohio History Center and this jar of soil went on display at that exhibit. I'm not sure, I don't think it's on display now, but the jar of soil is still there. So after the commemoration ceremony, the Equal Justice Initiative agreed to fund the marker and when it was erected, unfortunately, COVID had been widespread. So we had to have an online ceremony and again we just had songs, reenactments, speeches, local Black advocates to talk. The Dean of the OU actually came and spoke. We held a local essay contest for high schoolers which was really impressive. They did some deep research about racial violence and EJI funded a partial scholarship for the essay contest winners, which was really, really awesome. So it seems to be a common misconception that lynching was a Southern phenomenon, which is just inaccurate and it ignores how powerful and widespread white supremacy was. There was 18 recorded lynchings in Ohio alone and it's important to acknowledge that not all lynchings went reported. There's mysterious disappearings, there's other forms of murder or it's not recorded in the newspaper as a lynching, but 18 recorded lynchings in Ohio. And this area of Southeast Ohio is typically known for its involvement with the Underground Railroad as an area where Black Americans migrated for education, which is important to acknowledge and it's great and we should be talking about those things. But events like this lynching just shows how widespread racist views were in these areas that were thought to have these good race relations. And these public history projects are important to draw attention and have these conversations and hopefully inform the public. And addressing past instances, I hope, will cause people to want to have conversations about the present and how violence takes place still today in a different form with police brutality, mass incarceration, things like that. But if people can't even address and reconcile with the past, how are we going to address the violence that is taking place today? And I'm just a firm believer that it's important to address the past if we want to make a better future. Okay, where is my research headed? So my plan is to expand upon Midwestern lynchings to look at other lynch cases that were commemorated and involved with the Equal Justice Initiative like we did here in Athens. And surprisingly, there were only five cases commemorated. So these are just in chronological order here. The first was George Johnson in Atchinson, Kansas in 1870. He accidentally injured a white man while hunting and fled from the scene. And he was only being charged with fleeing from the scene of a crime. But 50 men decided to lynch him and a crowd of 2,000 gathered to watch. And he was shot, beaten, dragged and hanged. And law enforcement allowed the lynching to happen and no mob member was held accountable. And the second, of course, was Christopher Davis, which I've already discussed. And the third and fourth, so two lynchings happened in Oxford, Ohio. And their commemoration project acknowledged both of these lynchings. So the first was Simon Gornet in Oxford, Ohio in Butler County in 1877. He was accused of assault of a white woman. Law enforcement failed to prevent the lynching and no one was held accountable. The other person lynched was Henry Corbin in 1892 who was accused of murdering a white woman. And he was hanged and shot over 400 times. And law enforcement failed to prevent the lynching and no one was held accountable. And the fourth is probably the most well-known lynching out of these five. It was William Brown in Omaha, Nebraska in 1919. The crowd was estimated to be between 1,000 and 5,000 people. And they beat, hang, shot, dragged and set will on fire. Law enforcement participated in the lynching and no one was held accountable. So this top left picture is one that you would often see portrayed in, you know, books about lynching. It's a common picture used. This is a picture of Bill Brown and their commemoration and the marker. So some similarities. All five were accused of hurting white people. Four out of five was a white woman. And as I said, law enforcement either participated, did nothing or failed to protect the victim. Okay. And here are the questions that my dissertation will hope to address. So why are there only five lynchings commemorated in the Midwest? What makes communities willing to participate in these commemorations? Why are some communities politically ready to acknowledge and commemorate? And oh, you know, it's a pretty progressive university in Athens with a case of Will Brown and Omaha. It's a blue section in Nebraska. It's a big city and has a significant black population. You know, it's a typical outlier in the state that is typically Republican. So I would assume that a significant black population will probably have a role in commemoration. You know, they might be more willing to commemorate and remember. Oxford, Ohio with the two, the cases of the two lynchings in Miami of Ohio University. You know, there's the presence of this liberal arts school. So these are just some ideas that I'm starting to think about. So was there a unique pattern that Midwestern lynchings took? And I've already addressed that there are these similarities with hurting a white person with the involvement of law enforcement. And what does the history of lynchings in the Midwest tell us about racial and gender politics that would be different or similar to usual patterns? Is the idea of commemoration recognizing as individual human beings? So maybe we want to put individual names and faces to these active violence. It gives it more meaning. And why is it that we associate black codes, Jim Crow and lynchings strictly with the South? And I think a lot of that has to do with the legacy and misconception of the Civil War. So most Northerners and Midwesterners relied on slavery, too. For cotton and textiles for their factories. Slavery also ensured a clear racial hierarchy that ensured white privileges and in the association of blackness with slavery. Even abolitionists, not all of them meant they supported equality. Some did, but not a lot of them. And a lot of Northerners and Midwesterners didn't want to compete with black Americans for jobs. So a lot of white people in the North and Midwest, they were against that great migration of black Americans fleeing the South after the end of slavery, going to the North, going to the West. Because of the unwillingness to share white spaces with black Americans, they didn't want to say a lot of people didn't want to see black economic advancement, black representation in politics. And this is one thing coming back to Ida B. Wells. This is one thing that she pointed out as the true motivation for lynchings throughout her pamphlets. She used statistics to show that rape accusations of lynched victims were often false after the victim was lynched. There was either a consensual relationship or the white woman admitted to false claims, or often it was the white men making these accusations. And we have to remember that rape was often deemed anything inappropriate to white society. So it didn't have to necessarily be a penetration. It could be talking to white women, looking at a white woman wrong, getting too close. Something like that was equated to rape. So lynching, like black codes, like Jim Crow, were used to keep black Americans in a position of second class citizenship and deny rights and privileges in order to maintain the racial hierarchy. So these are some questions my future research is going to explore. And I'm basically going to use memory as my theoretical framework to discuss the gendered and racial reasons behind Midwestern lynchings. Okay, so thank you so much for listening and I have time for if anyone has any questions. Thank you so much, Jordan. So yeah, we're going to open it up to the audience for questions. You can either raise your hand and I will call on you. You can unmute and ask your question or if you'd prefer to type it into the chat. I will be happy to moderate that for Jordan. While our audience is collecting their thoughts, I am going to drop a link in the chat to a brief survey. If folks wouldn't mind clicking on that link and just completing, I think it's about four or five questions, I would really appreciate that. And then we will just give it a few minutes here while our audience thinks of their questions. All right, Jordan, we have a question from Dr. Jellison for, she says, great presentation, Jordan. Why do you think it took so long to get federal anti-lynching law passed, a federal anti-lynching law passed? I think it would just be the reluctance and unfortunately, the reluctance to acknowledge these past atrocities. There were so many groups starting with Ida B. Wells and there were even a group of white Southern women. I think it was called white women against her preventing lynchings who actually got together and said, we're not going to be the excuse for you lynching black Americans. There were these constant advocates to have federal legislation. And it's astounding that it's taken so long. In the early 2000s, there was, again, a bill trying to be passed. And I don't know if it's because we, I don't know, President Biden is president now. Politics have changed a little bit, but it's absolutely astounding. Great. Thank you so much. We do have another question in the chat. Lorraine Walkna is asking, will you be connecting the Underground Railroad to the idea that the North was seen as more, quote unquote, liberal? So I haven't done much, much research with the Underground Railroad and connecting it to racial violence, but that is absolutely correct statement. So I haven't looked into that. It's an interesting thing that I can take into consideration when I'm moving forward with my dissertation, but I haven't done much research on that. Great. Thank you. We do have another question from Brian Shown. He says, excellent job, Jordan. There's a lot of scholarship on Southern lynching. Do you think that the same motives led to the Midwestern lynchings or were different dynamics in play? I do think they have similar motivations. So when I was looking at the census records, I saw a lot of migration from Southern states to the Midwest, to Northern states. So it could possibly be that these views were migrating into these areas. And just like I said before, that these views of white supremacy were widespread. It was that Northerners and Midwesterners were reliant on slavery and held these views of white supremacy. So I think there are these similar motives. With Ida B. Wells' pamphlets, she explained and focused on the South. She explained that rape was often a common accusation. And with these five lynchings that I'm looking at now, that was the majority of the case. So I do think there are these similarities. All right, we have another question in the chat from Kelly Broughton. She says, thank you for this work. What is the one thing that you learned through your work that you wish all Midwesterners knew about this topic? Again, I would just say that it's important to know that this area was an important spot for Black education, work with the Underground Railroad. But it's also important to know that racial violence was widespread. I think that would just be an important thing that I would want Midwesterners to know. Yeah, and just hopefully spreading. I want to see more commemoration projects. I hope more people hear about what the Equal Justice Initiative is doing. I really would like these perspectives. The Equal Justice Initiative is doing. I really would like these projects to spread. So the public gets more education on these issues. So that's one thing. Thanks, Jordan. I'm just going to give it another minute to see if we have any other questions coming into the chat. Or if anyone would like to raise their hand. I think that's it. All right, so with that, I think we're going to wrap up for this morning. Jordan, thank you so much for sharing your most excellent work with us. We look forward to seeing more from you in the future. Thank you everyone for joining us. I hope you have a great Friday. Thank you everyone. I hope everyone has a great day.