Your Support Has Inspired Us!

100 Years From Mississippi is a 40-minute documentary about the amazing journey of Mamie Kirkland’s flight from Mississippi and her family’s perilous migration from the Jim Crow south to escape her father’s lynching, murders of African-Americans on the streets of East St. Louis and KKK cross burnings on their lawn in Ohio. At 108 she has become a celebrated elder whose story has captured the front page of the New York Times.

Your tax-deductible donation – large or small, will help us finish our important documentary that links this terrible past with the challenges of today.

DONATE

LYNCHING IN AMERICA website honors Mamie Kirkland’s story

Exciting news from the 100 Years from Mississippi film project! We are honored that our story, narrated by Tarabu, is featured in a groundbreaking new website launched by Equal Justice Initiative in collaboration with Google.

“Lynching in America” documents over 4000 lynchings and Mamie’s story is the first feature in the “LISTEN” section. Explore this powerful new website and share it with your friends and colleagues. Let history remind us what we need to do today!

Watch Lynching in America below.

Listen to all stories from Lynching in America

Interview of Mamie Kirkland with the New York Times.

ELLISVILLE, Miss. — The dark S.U.V. rented for the occasion stopped outside the one-story City Hall. A wheelchair was rolled up to receive a petite passenger wearing a baseball cap dappled with sparkles, her hair gray-white, her skin mocha brown, her socks hot pink.

Settling into the chair, Mamie Lang Kirkland took a quick look around. It had been a while. About a century.

When she was 7, her family fled Ellisville amid talk of lynchings. On to Illinois, where white mobs rioted. To Ohio, where the Klan raised torches. To western New York, where she and her steelworker husband had nine children, and the one miscarriage she always includes in her account…

View full interview here