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The James Taylor Justice Coalition (JTJC) has a singular focus and a defined mission. Aligned with the Equal Justice Initiative’s (EJI) Community Remembrance Projects, we seek to shine the light of truth upon the more than 4,000 extrajudicial lynchings of African American people that occurred in the U.S. between 1877 and 1950. Only by telling the unvarnished truth about our past can we begin to address the injustices that continue against Black and Brown people in the U.S. today.
Our JTJC mission is to educate our community about the injustice of James Taylor’s lynching in Chestertown, MD in 1892. Through our outreach, we will show how racial terror and injustice continued against Black and Brown people in the form of Black Codes, Jim Crow, red-lining, mass incarceration, police brutality, and systemic discrimination in government and the workplace.
The primary objective of the Education and Engagement Committee is to plan and conduct events, activities, collaborations and programming in our community to advance this mission.
Our goal is that, armed with the truth about the past and knowledge of the present, the people of Kent County and the Eastern Shore of Maryland will seek to undertake the changes in our society necessary to insure justice and equality for all.
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Statement of the Equal Justice Initiative / Community Remembrance Project
While we acknowledge the mass killings of Native Americans and the anti-immigration rhetoric to people of Latino and Chinese background set a precedent of socialized violence in America that should be meaningfully concretized, EJI’s Community Remembrance Project specifically focuses on African American experiences, from enslavement to mass incarceration, that continues to inform America’s legacy of racial and economic injustice against Black people.
We particularly focus on African American victims of racial terror lynching, which we define as racially motivated acts of terrorism against African American individuals and their communities involving various forms of torture for the lynching, included but not limited to burning, mutilation, and hanging, at the hands of mobs of three or more white people, between 1877 and 1950.
This focus relates to our specific emphasis on the relationship between chattel slavery, racial terror lynching, Jim Crow segregation – each informed by a narrative of racial difference and mythology of white supremacy versus Black inferiority – and how the legacy of racial and economic injustice and inequality continues to inform mass incarceration today.