“Strange Fruit” performed by Billie Holiday








APJMM embodies a statewide collaborative effort to acknowledge, and to learn from, our shared documented history of hundreds of incidents of extra-legal racial, political and religious violence and injustices, with the goal of creating meaningful avenues for transformative peace and restorative justice through truth-seeking and reconciliation.






“The Struggle of the South” mural painted by Joe Jones at Commonwealth College in Mena, Arkansas, in 1935.
The mural was fully restored in 2019 and is now housed at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, Downtown campus.
Cover illustration of Le Petit Journal Illustre (Paris, France), dated June 13, 1926, depicting the lynching of Albert Blades in Mississippi County, Arkansas

A letter, dated September 28, 1894, sent to Judge Albion Winegar Tourgée, founder and president of the National Citizens’ Rights Association, who orchestrated the test case that led to the U.S. Supreme Court decision Plessy v. Ferguson, from Rev. A. M. Middlebrooks of Pine Bluff, Arkansas, who served as the federal Deputy Revenue Collector for the Eastern District of Arkansas, complaining to the leader of the pre-NAACP organization about Governor William Meade Fishback’s failure to protect Henry C. Robinson, Luke Washington, and Richard Washington, from being lynched on September 22nd in Desha County by a known pre-mediated mob of both Black and White perpetrators. Gov. Fishback did offer a $200 reward each for the arrest and conviction of the leaders of the lynch mob. In response to this lynching and the $200 reward offered for the perpetrators, the Richmond Planet, on October 13th, opined: “Colored men of the south should purchase insurance policies to protect their houses, and revolvers and Winchesters to protect their lives. Lynch-law must go!”

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