Lynchings are a part of our history. We have to tell that truth.

When white nationalists marched on Charlottesville, Va., a year ago, killing a woman and promising more mayhem, the bitterness of racial violence tasted too familiar. The marchers came to register their naive support for memorials to the Confederacy, but those who have not forgotten the ways of Jim Crow could recognize a lynch mob when they saw one.

Many of the marchers had traveled miles to the site of a memorial to Robert E. Lee. But they offered no words of consolation to the thousands of African American men and women lost to racial violence since Lee surrendered. Until the National Memorial for Peace and Justice opened in Montgomery, Ala., this summer, there was virtually no destination for those who would travel to memorialize the victims of white supremacy. In North Carolina, although our universities, county seats, and state capital boast monuments to the Confederacy, there are virtually no visual markers for those lost to lynching.

Lynchings are as old as the 13 original colonies and early in our nation’s history claimed more white lives than black. But lynching took on a racial meaning after the Civil War as whites used the threat of lawless hanging and humiliation to terrorize black communities.

The recent opening of the memorial stirred the imagination of our congregation in Chapel Hill. What if we traveled to tell a more faithful and healing story than those angry marchers in Charlottesville? People of faith like us call a journey like this a pilgrimage. We want to hold in prayer those victims of racial violence who are lost to our nation’s memory. We believe that we need to confess the sins of a nation that celebrates its “heritage” of slave holding.

A project of Bryan Stevenson’s Equal Justice Initiative, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice has documented some 4,400 victims to lynching across the south since 1870. We know that is an estimate of lynching victims far too low and that lynching wasn’t restricted to the southern states. Ida B. Wells-Barnett, the first journalist to systematically document lynchings, put the number closer to 10,000.

The Montgomery memorial has identified one lynching victim in Orange County, where our church is located. The Chatham Record of Pittsboro confirmed that Manly McCauley was lynched for a “scandalous elopement” with a white woman who was cheating on her husband.

Pilgrim travelers from United Church of Chapel Hill have done their own research and identified at least six more victims in Orange County, all between July and December 1869, who have not been included in the memorial we’ll visit. Five of them were denied due process for arson. “Barn burning” was a common justification for racially-motivated mob violence. As we travel, we’ll remember them in prayer. The names of two are not known. The others were Daniel Morrow, Jefferson Morrow, Guy Cyrus and Wright Woods.

Looking into the history of lynching in the counties that surround us, including Alamance, Durham, Chatham, Wake, Person, and Caswell, our pilgrims know of 25 additional lawless killings in our area between 1865 and 1920.

We must reject every impulse in our nation today that hides this terrible part of our history. The only way to liberate ourselves from the sickness of white supremacy is to tell the truth about. We need to know the history and hear the stories.

Although the perpetrators of this violence can no longer be brought to justice, we can recognize the humanity of the victims and honor them as children of God. Can you imagine how painful it must be for those families today who remember a grandfather or uncle or cousin lost to a wild and angry mob? What scares me most is that the crowd in Charlottesville knew what they were doing. They were using old tricks to inspire fear.

But those who know the truth are not so easy to intimidate. The violence of white mobs and the living structures of racism are incompatible with the love of Jesus. Our pilgrimage to Montgomery is a simple testimony that our nation is called to live in peace, justice, and equity.

This story was originally published August 2, 2018 at 10:06 AM.