New exhibit tells the story of racial lynchings across Missouri
KANSAS CITY, Missouri (KCTV) There’s a new exhibit at the Black Archives of Mid-America in Kansas City dedicated to the many lynching victims across the state of Missouri.
Today the group held a memorial ceremony and funeral procession for one of those victims, Levi Harrington, who was lynched in the West Bottoms 139 years ago.
A large mob of white Kansas Citians seized Levi Harrington from Kansas City Police custody on April 3, 1882, and took him to a bridge overlooking the West Bottoms, hung him and shot him. Hundreds gathered to watch the gruesome killing unfold.
New exhibit tells the story of racial lynchings across Missouri
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New exhibit tells the story of racial lynchings across Missouri
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Carlos Moreno / KCUR 89.3
Originally published on April 9, 2021 5:15 pm
A large mob of white Kansas Citians seized Levi Harrington from Kansas City police custody on April 3, 1882, and took him to a bridge overlooking the West Bottoms, hung him and shot him. Hundreds gathered to watch the gruesome killing unfold.
On Saturday community members and leaders will gather where Harrington died, and honor him by collecting a bit of soil from the area where he was lynched.
“By collecting soil, I think we re reclaiming that space for the person whose life was so horribly stolen,” said Staci Pratt, a founding member of the Community Remembrance Project of Missouri, a group focused on memorializing lynching victims across Missouri, raising public awareness and starting conversations about reconciliation. I think it s really profound actually.
HAYS On the night of Jan. 6, 1869, Luke Barnes, Lee Watkins and James Ponder sat in jail accused of shooting a white railroad worker in this northwest Kansas town.
By sunrise, the three Black men had been dragged from their cell by a mob of white townspeople and hanged from a railroad trestle over the creek that separates the town from Fort Hays, where the men were stationed in the U.S. Army. A Leavenworth newspaper reported that the town “indulged them in a dance in mid-air.”
One hundred and twenty years later in 1989 the county commission gave a 5-mile stretch of road near that bridge a new name drawn from that ugly history: Noose Road.