About Us
Our Mission
The Union County Community Remembrance Project seeks to document and recognize the history of lynching and racial terrorism in Union County.
Our Vision
Our vision is to foster ongoing collaborative education, justice, and healing through preservation. (Updated 1 Jan 2023)
The Union County Community Remembrance Project (UCCRP) developed as a way to address the history of racial terrorism, violence, and lynching in the Union County, South Carolina. While some people in Union County have knowledge of the racial violence that happened here and some lynchings are still remembered in the local community today, others have become aware of this violent past through the UCCRP.
Community members and leaders including South Carolina State Park Service staff from Rose Hill Plantation State Historic Site, Union County Tourism director, NAACP leaders, and the Mayor and his staff came together to form a coalition of people invested in telling the truth about Union’s history. These early coalition leaders saw an opportunity to develop the project as one of the Equal Justice Initiative’s Community Remembrance Projects and helped get the project off the ground in the fall of 2019. The South Carolina African American Heritage Commission organized the first meeting between all key coalition members in January 2020. Despite setbacks due to the pandemic, we began virtual outreach and programming in summer 2020 and received our official EJI sponsorship in early fall 2020.
Current research has documented a staggering 18 confirmed victims of lynching in Union County – from the Union County Jail Raid in 1871 which was one of the largest Klan jail raids in the southeast through lynchings as late as 1934.
We placed three new historical markers to lynching victims in downtown Union so that the truth of this traumatic history is accurately represented and acknowledged by the public.
We see the historical markers as the first step of recognition in a longer process of beginning to heal and tell the truth of the lives impacted by hate and violence. The coalition worked with the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) to install the markers and conduct a soil collection ceremony. We will continue to work with EJI to obtain a matching monument from the National Memorial for Peace and Justice.
Equal Justice Initiative
The Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) is a nonprofit founded by public interest lawyer Bryan Stevenson that conducts work in criminal justice reform, racial justice, and public education. EJI has also founded the widely acclaimed Legacy Museum and National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama. Their Community Remembrance Project initiative supports local communities in memorializing victims of racial violence through historical markers and soil collections.
