About

The Lawrence Branch of the NAACP formed a History Committee in February 2019, which began working with the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) of Montgomery, Alabama to form a local Community Remembrance Project Coalition. The Coalition would partner with the EJI to memorialize and reconcile racist violence in Douglas County, Kansas. The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic complicated the efforts, but over the next year and a half, the Lawrence/Douglas County Community Remembrance Project Coalition was organized, and held its first meeting virtually over Zoom on September 16, 2020.

The LDCCRP Coalition’s initial efforts were to memorialize the lynching of three Black men, Isaac King, George Robertson, and Peter Vinegar, from the Kansas River Bridge in Lawrence on June 10, 1882. The EJI has several programs to memorialize racial terror lynchings in the United States including collecting soil from near the site of lynchings and supplying local communities with historical markers detailing the story of local lynchings. The LDDCRP Coalition organized committees and work on the projects began.

There was a solemn Soil Collection Ceremony on October 8, 2021, when soil collected from near the base of the bridge was put in glass jars supplied by EJI what had the names of the three lynching victims on them. One set of jars was sent to the EJI’s Legacy Museum in Montgomery, one set is in the permanent collection of the Watkins Museum of History in Lawrence, and a third set is being stored by the LDCCRP Coalition for future use. Jars dedicated to Margaret “Sis” Vinegar were also filled. She came within one vote by the mob of being lynched along with her father, but later failed to receive justice from the judicial system and was sent to prison at the age of 14. She died in prison from tuberculosis when she was only 20.

A marker memorializing the lynching was supplied by the EJI, and it was dedicated in another solemn ceremony on June 10, 2022, the 140th anniversary of the lynching. It overlooks the stone pier that is the only remaining part of the bridge from which the lynching occurred. A second marker will be supplied by the EJI to memorialize Margaret Vinegar’s story, one of racist sexual violence and the failure of the judicial system and society at large to give her the justice she deserved.

The LDCCRP Coalition is working on a program to foster and conduct community-wide reconciliation for the centuries of racist violence and intolerance in Lawrence and Douglas County. The intent is to put an end to the generational trauma resulting from those incidents that has been carried down unreconciled through the years.

There are many other unresolved issues in the racial history of the community that the LDCCRP Coalition will address and work towards finding solutions for. Individuals and organizations interested in helping in this work are welcomed to get on board and help us strive for a better future for generations to come.