Hate in a Hallmark Town, Part 5: A Community Acknowledges a Dark Past
"I humbly plead and pray that telling the stories will prevent us from falling back into darkness," said Franklin, Tennessee, Mayor Ken Moore.
This post is part of a continuing series that explains how I began this unexpected journey into the world of hate. Other essays from the “Hate in a Hallmark Town” can be viewed here.
This past Saturday in Franklin—the affluent Middle Tennessee community that inspired Hate Comes to Main Street—the sun seemed to shine just a bit brighter.
Perhaps, it was because my perceptions of the quaint town had been dimmed by the antics of former Alderman Gabrielle Hanson, who had shown up at a candidate forum in 2023 with a group of neo-Nazis providing security. There were also the memories of the night a group of her supporters had physically accosted me and my photojournalist colleague at another event.
Along with her ardently MAGA followers, Hanson had opposed efforts to include the history of Franklin’s Black citizens alongside the story of the Confederates who waged a bloody stand in the closing days of the Civil War. And she had been most vehement in her opposition to any historical markers acknowledging the dark days of lynchings in a place that prided itself as a Hallmark town.
Seeming to see a sinister plot that everyone else had chosen to ignore, Hanson insisted the “racial terror markers” were part of a secret Marxist plot.
“If we can get a racial terror placard for someone who experienced a civil rights crime, they can get victim status,” she argued during a March 2023 meeting. “If they can get victim status, they can file for reparations.”
Hanson continued, “With these racial terror placards, we are setting ourselves up for financial reparations.”
Her rantings, to my ears, were truly bizarre given the fact that one does not need to have a historical marker to be considered a victim, and no one had ever made any such claims for reparations based upon the erection of such markers.
That debate still echoed through my mind as I met a group of local pastors on the public square to take photos for an upcoming Hate Comes to Main Street post.
“Is Franklin ever going to erect those lynching markers?” I asked, fully expecting to hear a tale of continued hesitation to fully address Franklin’s history.
Pastor Chris Williamson surprised me.
“As a matter of fact, they’re going to dedicate them in about 15 minutes,” Williamson said, pointing past the 40-foot, marble Confederate statue that looms over Franklin’s Main Street.
This was an unexpected development that gave me renewed hope.
‘Pray for light to continue to open our eyes’
There, at the town’s Bicentennial Park Pavilion, a few dozen of Franklin’s most civic minded citizens—many members of a group known as Williamson Remembers—gathered to dedicate the first two of three planned markers. The third will eventually be erected in the shadow of the Confederate monument.
My first impression was the number of attendees paled in comparison to the hundreds of people who had jammed Franklin’s public square to mourn the death of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.
Still, it was a hard-fought victory by a passionate few.
“Today, we create a new legacy by shining the light of truth on lynchings in the city of Franklin,” said former pastor Kenneth Hill. “This dedication ceremony puts us on a new path toward becoming the beloved community.”
Hill co-chaired the group of citizens who had met once a month for three years as part of the effort “to acknowledge, honor, and give voice to the stories of racial injustice that have long been hidden or untold in Williamson County.”
Franklin Mayor Kenneth Moore, a longtime Republican who has faced many accusations from the MAGA crowd of being a RINO (Republican in Name Only), was applauded for leading the way for the project.
As I listened to Moore’s remarks, I felt they perfectly captured the difficulty of the task faced by these citizens and the ambition for a better tomorrow that motivated them. Below are excerpts from what the mayor told the crowd.
Today is a historic day.
The task laid out for the committee was not an easy one, and it was not without criticism particularly at the time of the heightened tensions of a hotly contested election season and the effects of the pandemic. The committee was committed to doing it right, down to the smallest detail.
Rabbi Laurie Rice introduced me to the work of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama, and to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice—the nation’s first comprehensive memorial dedicated to victims of racial terror and lynchings. Many on our committee traveled together to Montgomery to hear these stories firsthand.
Inside the memorial, 805 steel rectangles hang in solemn rows, each representing a county where lynchings occurred with the victims’ names cut into the metal. Standing among these powerful and painful reminders, alongside other solemn depictions of the cruelty of slavery, I felt a clear conviction that we, too, must tell this story, the story of Williamson County.
We are one of many Civil War towns in which this occurred, but we have chosen to perhaps tell it in a different way than others, just as we have with the “Fuller Story.” The Williamson Remembers project tells the stories of these acts of racially motivated killings in our community. The markers’ narration reflects that each word has been carefully chosen, and historic verification has been confirmed by multiple sources. These stories affirm the importance of telling the truth, and they mark not an end but a beginning—a starting point for strengthening our civic health.
They are meant to bring light to a dark spot in our history and educate others moving forward.
As we unveil two of the markers today, I urge you to carefully read the narratives and pray for light to continue to open our eyes and wipe out the darkness of prejudice and antisemitism. I humbly plead and pray that telling the stories will prevent us from falling back into darkness.
May it be so!
So what do you think?
Please let me know in the comments below.
Sad that the markers were controversial. Is Ms Hanson still in office?