I had never done this before.

I had no written testimony for the hearing on my lynching bill.

Instead, I distributed to the committee the chilling account of the lynching of George Armwood in Sherrilyn Ifill’s On the Courthouse Lawn.

I pointed out that Clarence Mitchell, Jr. reported on the Armwood lynching for the Afro American.  His successor as chair of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, Wade Henderson, had submitted written testimony, I told the committee.

In response to a delegate’s question, I said that I would consider it a friendly amendment to limit the remembrance of lynchings to historical markers, removing memorials from the bill.

Ironically, the state’s historical markers program originated in 1933, the same year as the last recorded lynching in the state, George Armwood’s.