100 Years Later: The Lynching of Grandpa Crawford

100 Years Later: The Lynching of (Grandpa) Anthony Crawford: Has racial difference ended or simply evolved? Speaker/Performer: Doria Dee Johnson, Public Historian and Activist. Sponsors: The On The Same Page Program, Equity and Inclusion, Vice Chancellor, College of Environmental Design, Department of African American Studies, Fannie Lou Hamer Black Resource Center, Department of Sociology Anthony Crawford was lynched in Abbeville, South Carolina in 1916 because of an altercation over the price of cottonseed. After his death, his family was banished from town and their property illegally confiscated. Doria Johnson, Crawford’s great-granddaughter, is a historian and activist whose scholarly work and social justice efforts are closely linked to her family story. In 2005, she successfully lobbied the U.S. Senate to publicly apologize for how long it took the federal government to enact anti-lynching legislation. She recently worked with Bryan Stevenson (author of Just Mercy, the featured book for On the Same Page in 2016) and the Equal Justice Initiative to establish one of the only historical markers in the country dedicated to lynching, marking the site of her great-grandfather’s death. Dr. Leon Litwack, A. & M. Morrison Professor of American History Emeritus, has written about the Crawford lynching in his landmark book, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow, and, as a prefatory essayist in Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America. Using her family’s painful story as a lens through which we can examine our nation’s history, Johnson will describe how past injustices propelled her from the role of daughter to genealogist to activist to scholar, and now international human rights and restorative justice agent. A PhD candidate in U.S. History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Johnson is a Visiting Scholar at The Newberry Library and a United States Representative to the Nelson Mandela International Dialogues in Cape Town and Sri Lanka, addressing issues of memory and justice.