Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / In 1922, George Tompkins was found dead in an isolated area of Riverside Park. Though the media and evidence present pointed to Tompkins having been the victim of a lynching, the official ruling was that of suicide. Almost a century later, a multiracial, driven group of individuals set out to memorialize Tompkins as a victim of lynching and challenge the ruling that he had taken his own life. In discussing deaths such as George Tompkins’, it is vital to remind oneself that the victims of lynchings were more than just statistics in the ongoing epidemic of anti-Black violence that has permeated the history of the United States. By employing a victim-centered methodology, we can examine the lives of these victims before the worst happened to them and recognize the three-dimensionality of their lived experiences. This work examines the lived experience, lynching death, and memorialization process one hundred years later of George Tompkins. In understanding the means by which he lived, died, and was remembered, we can better understand the ways that this process can play a role in multiple contemporary communities.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / The most recent racial justice movement that emerged in the United States beginning in the summer of 2020 in response to the murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd laid bare the overdue need to revisit white America’s legacy of racist violence against its Black citizens. Historians can help bridge the gap between past and present and urge more Americans to identify and confront racial violence. As a born-and-raised Hoosier, I wanted to contribute to social change and racial justice at home. The historical silence on the history of racist violence in Indiana supports the myth that Indiana was a free state where Black citizens found refuge from the racist violence they experienced in the South; thousands of primary source newspapers containing details of white perpetrators lynching and violently attacking Black Hoosiers refute this myth. This paper identifies white perpetrators’ acts of anti-Black violence and Black Hoosiers resistance to anti-Black violence throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This analysis of racial violence in Indiana shows that white perpetrators employed violence in defense of white supremacy and that Black Hoosiers resisted anti-Black violence and white supremacy. The record indicates that racial terrorism has been embedded in the fabric of Indiana since its founding. Grassroots efforts, such as the Facing Injustice Project’s work to acknowledge the 1901 lynching of George Ward in Terre Haute, Indiana, are starting to recognize the harm white Hoosiers did to Black Hoosiers and bring repair to victims’ descendants and communities. More public history projects are needed to engage all Hoosiers in reckoning with the history of anti-Black violence. Activists and organizations have shown that Wikipedia is one digital institution where anyone can do the work of rooting out inequalities and injustices. This digital public history Wikipedia project challenges the historical silence on Indiana’s racially violent past by telling the truth about the history on one of the most-visited websites in the world. Using Wikipedia to do public history invites Hoosiers of all backgrounds to take up the work of acknowledging Indiana’s history of anti-Black violence, updating the historic record, and reevaluating the narrative constantly.