This post is part of a CityLab series on open secrets—stories about what’s hiding in plain sight.
An empty trestle bridge spans a grey river. White-washed doors lean on the side of a barn. Telephone poles and a tin shed frame a half-mowed ravine.
Unseen in these otherwise mundane images of the American South: visual evidence for the acts of racial terror that once unfolded there.
“It seems that many Americans, especially white Americans, either don't know much about lynchings or are reticent to discuss it,” Oliver Clasper, a London-born photographer and journalist, says via email. Clasper has set out to provoke a conversation with a project he calls The Spaces We Inherit. In photographs and interviews, he is documenting historic sites where African Americans were terrorized and murdered by white neighbors, and how individuals living in the orbit of this buried past are affected by it today.
[For more of this story, written by Laura Bliss, go to https://www.citylab.com/crime/...an-lynchings/522789/]
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