ABBEVILLE, S.C. — In this small South Carolina town near the Georgia line, where some say the Confederacy was born and died, descendants of a man lynched 100 years ago are erecting a downtown memorial to him and other black men killed by white mobs after the Civil War.
Abbeville City Council authorized the marker that will be unveiled Saturday, 100 years and one day after Anthony Crawford was beaten, dragged out of town with a noose around his neck and hanged from a tree where his body was riddled with bullets.
It’s the latest public acknowledgment of South Carolina’s racist past.
In recent years, officials have apologized to civil rights protesters who were arrested in the 1960s, and a judge ruled that a 14-year-old black boy was wrongly executed in 1944.
Most prominently, following the 2015 massacre of nine blacks in a Charleston church, the Confederate flag was removed at the Statehouse where it had flown for more than 50 years.
“Most of life is generational. Thoughts, attitudes and actions change,” said interim Abbeville City Manager David Krumwiede, who serves a town of 5,200 people where about half are white and half are black.