Thanks to contributions from area residents, a push to raise enough money to place a marker on the gravesite of Milwaukee’s only lynching victim has succeeded.
Forest Home Cemetery has ordered the headstone for George Marshall Clark, a Black man who was hanged on Sept. 8, 1861, after an angry white mob dragged him from a city jail cell. Clark was buried that day in the 200-year-old cemetery without a headstone.
The cemetery partnered with a young activist to raise money for the grave marker; they reached the fundraising goal after a story about the effort appeared in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.