photo by: Kerry Altenbernd contributed photo

Two employees of the Bowersock Mills & Power Company, which has a dam on the Kansas River, collect soil on Sept. 2, 2021, from the south riverbank near where three men were lynched from the Kansas River Bridge in 1882. The soil will be used in a national lynching memorial.

As part of an ongoing project to commemorate the victims of a lynching that occurred in Lawrence in 1882, the public is invited to attend an event to collect soil from the site for a national memorial for lynching victims.

Pete Vinegar, Isaac King and George Robertson, all of whom were Black, were lynched by a mob at the Kansas River bridge near downtown Lawrence on June 10, 1882. The Lawrence branch of the NAACP has been working since 2019 with the Equal Justice Initiative, which created a national lynching memorial in Montgomery, Ala., to erect a historical marker at the site of the lynching and take other steps to commemorate the victims.

Those steps include collecting soil from the site of the lynching to include at the national memorial. As part of the project, the Lawrence/Douglas County Community Remembrance Project Coalition was formed. The coalition will conduct a soil ceremony on Saturday morning, according to a news release from the coalition.

The release states that the public is invited to witness the solemn occasion of filling memorial jars with the soil from where Vinegar, King and Robertson were lynched. The coalition collected the soil earlier in September and it has been drying to prepare it for placement in jars that will become a permanent memorial at The National Memorial for Peace and Justice. Watkins Museum of History will also receive memorial jars of soil.

Speakers at the ceremony will include retired pastor Rev. Verdell Taylor Jr. of St. Luke African Methodist Episcopal; Coalition Chair and NAACP President Ursula Minor; and Coalition Chair Kerry Altenbernd. Representatives of the Lawrence’s Black community will fill the jars.

The ceremony will take place at 10 a.m. Saturday under the Kansas River bridge on the south bank of the river, near City Hall. Attendees can access the ceremony by driving along the gravel road on the north side of the intersection of Sixth and Kentucky streets. Signs will be posted, and limited parking is available. Social distancing and masking guidelines will be followed.