Emma Jones ’20 knew she came from a place steeped in history. But she didn’t know pieces of that history had been left out.

“There’s a lot of memorials there,” Jones says of Walker County, Georgia, “just not for the man that we lynched.”

It’s been more than two years since Jones first heard the story of 24-year-old Henry White, a Black man who was hung by a mob in 1916. For two years, she initiated and helped lead an effort to install a memorial to White in the county where he was killed. The memorial was dedicated in September.

Jones grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina, but moved to rural northwest Georgia in high school. She came to Furman to study psychology. She wanted an education that would feed her passion for justice, especially within prison populations.

In summer 2018, Jones took a research internship at Auburn University, in eastern Alabama. She worked for the school’s Juvenile Delinquency Laboratory, splitting her time between the lab and a local prison.

During that time, she visited The National Memorial for Peace and Justice and The Legacy Museum, both projects of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI). The memorial commemorates documented lynchings throughout the United States. That’s when she was surprised to find her own county represented in the display.

EJI works with community groups to create local memorials to lynching victims and to foster conversations about race and justice. Jones decided she’d help to examine Walker County.

Her initial efforts with local