Civil WrongsEp.2: The Descendants

Please be aware that we discuss extreme violence and that you’ll hear racial slurs that were common to the time. 

In this second episode about the Ell Persons lynching of 1917, we talk to the people alive today who have deep connections to this century-old story. There’s Michele Whitney, Ell Persons’ great grandniece, who never knew about this piece of family history until a Memphis organization reached out to her in 2017. There’s Laura Wilfong Miller: her great grandparents were the aunt and uncle of the white teenage girl whose murder set off the investigation that led to Ell Persons’ lynching. And there’s Stephen Haley, who discovered his grandfather was one of the thousands in the crowd that witnessed the lynching.