The Birmingham Times
Birmingham’s Linn Park, from the now defunct City Stages music festival to the recently removed Confederate monument, has seen its share of city history.
The seven-acre park that separates Birmingham City Hall and the Jefferson County Courthouse in downtown also may also have been the site of the county’s first lynching, according to a local grass-roots coalition that documents racial terror.
The Jefferson County Memorial Project (JCMP), composed of over 40 community partners, researches the untold history of lynching in the county and the historical links among slavery, Jim Crow and present-day mass incarceration.
Their latest report, “Contested Terrain: A Historical Walk Through Birmingham’s Linn Park” was written by JCMP Fellows, a group of 20 college and graduate students from Birmingham-area colleges: Jefferson State Community College, Samford University, Birmingham-Southern College and the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB).