"The U.S. House is considering a bill that would put lynching sites in western Tennessee on track to become part of the National Park Service, part of a trend this year of Congress using the agency to advance discussions of the nation’s troubled and often violent racial history.

A bill from U.S. Rep. Steve Cohen, Tennessee Democrat, would require the National Park Service to study the feasibility of adding sites in and around Memphis where white mobs committed lynchings for decades, from just after the Civil War to the Jim Crow era.

Proponents of the bill say understanding an ugly past in which Black people were terrorized and murdered is important.

“Until we remind people of our past, we will not over overcome it, and we will not have a better society,” Cohen said during a July subcommittee hearing on the bill. “We need to recognize the errors in our past.”"

Jacob Fischler reports for the States Newsroom Septenber 11, 2022. [2]