Remembrance & Reconciliation Panel Encouraging Tough Conversations

Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer

The Anderson County Museum hosted a panel discussion Tuesday led by the Anderson Area Remembrance and Reconciliation Initiative,. to explore personal and group experiences concerning racial injustice with an eye toward creating a better future.

The group, formed to both remember five documented victims of racial lynching in Anderson County between 1894 and 1911, and to work through “dialogue, education, and fellowship to move our community toward reconciliation and elimination of racial disparities and the realization of “Beloved Community” as described by The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King.”

The panel, former AnMed CEO John Miller, Anderson Mayor Terence Roberts, AnMed Director, Diversity & Language Services, and Stuart Sprague, who serves on faculty at AnMed Health and is a retired Anderson College professor, talked about the challenges they and the group has faced – and it’s successes – as well as plans for the future.

The victims’ names: Ed Sullivan, Elbert Harris, John Laddison, Reuben Elrod, and Willis Jackson are also memorialized by an art installation commissioned by the AAR&RI group, which includes soil samples from the sites of the lynchings. The sculpture is currently on display on the second floor of the Thrift Library at Anderson University, but an display at the Anderson County Museum also honors the victims.

AAR&RI continues the effort to raise awareness, foster dialogue, educate, and encourage conversations that will acknowledge the past and look forward “to a time when true fellowship prevails among people of all races in our community.”