As you may recall, we have been working over the last year with our friends at EJI, and local school administrators, teachers, and staff to offer our first-ever Racial Justice Essay Contest for Leon County public high school students.
We are now excited to announce that we will host an awards ceremony on Saturday, March 4, from 5-7 pm at the FSU Law School Rotunda. The program for the event will include an annual reckoning in remembrance of the four lynchings in Leon County: Pierce Taylor (1897), Mick Morris (1909), Richard Hawkins (1937), and Ernest Ponder (1937), a brief presentation on the ongoing work of the Tallahassee Community Remembrance Project, and a time to recognize and honor the twenty local high school students who submitted essays. We want to show our support for these exceptional students and their helpful academic advisors in the spirit of rewarding truth-telling and scholarship engaging our shared history, trials and triumphs, challenges and solutions.
We need your help to spread the word! Please share the details of the events within your local networks and partner organizations. Especially in a tense political environment, we want to surround these courageous young scholars with support and encouragement for their important work.
This scholarship contest is part of the community remembrance work of the Tallahassee Community Remembrance Project. EJI offers this opportunity in connection with its Community Remembrance Project, which focuses on memorializing the more than 6,000 African American victims of racial terror lynching killed between the end of the Civil War in 1865 and World War II. Communities across our nation have been profoundly impacted by the legacies of the eras of enslavement, racial terror lynching, and segregation in ways that continue to influence our social, political, and personal practices and institutions. EJI and local communities are working together to help advance a more truthful understanding of this history. We believe that a deeper understanding about our nation’s history of racial injustice is important to addressing contemporary questions of social justice and equality, and each project helps our nation participate more fully in a sequential process of truth and reconciliation.
For more information about the contest, contact tcrpessaycontest@gmail.com.