Proving once more they’re the biggest snowflakes of the bunch, a group of unknown vandals repeatedly shot two historical markers in Georgia dedicated to Jackie Robinson and victims of lynching.
According to CNN, the signs were part of the Civil Rights Trail, a series of markers devoted to explaining how Black people overcame slavery, Jim Crow laws, violence, and would go on to make history. After The Georgia Historical Society received news that Robinson’s sign, located in his birthplace of Cairo, Ga., had been vandalized they sent a member to investigate. The member found that the sign was apparently shot on both sides, with Lt. Daniel Lindsay of the Grady County Sheriff’s Office saying it looked as though a shotgun was used.
The sign was located in a relatively remote area, and as such local authorities have no leads on when the vandalism initially occurred nor who might have been responsible.
From CNN:
Georgia Historical Society board member Erroll B. Davis Jr., former chancellor of the University System of Georgia, decried the damage done to the marker for Robinson, the Major League Baseball star whose achievement in breaking the sport’s color barrier “should bring pride to all Americans.”
“This is a shameful act of vandalism that unfortunately has been carried out against several other markers that commemorate Civil Rights figures, in Georgia and beyond,” Davis said in a statement.
Robinson’s marker was the second in the last year to be damaged by gunfire. In late 2020, unknown vandals also apparently shot at a marker near Valdosta that memorializes lynching victims including Mary Turner, a 21-year-old Black woman who was burned and shot to death by a mob while she was eight months pregnant. She was killed the day after her husband was lynched, two of 11 Black residents of their town to be lynched by a mob within days.
The vandalism of Turner’s sign was so severe that the sign had to be recast. As white America continues to feel aggrieved for no fucking reason, civil rights markers such as these have been repeatedly vandalized. In Mississippi, a memorial to Emmett Till had to be reforged with bulletproof steel after it was repeatedly shot at by folks who probably say “waving the confederate flag isn’t racist,” and then turn around to do shit like this.
As a result of the Georgia Historical Society financing, that same course of action is unlikely. Instead, Historical Society president and CEO Todd Groce told CNN that after being recast, the signs will likely be relocated to a more populated area so that more people can see them and will hopefully make them less likely to be vandalised.
“All Americans of all races need to embrace these stories,” Groce told CNN in regard to the markers. “It illustrates who we are. Sometimes it tells some pretty ugly things about us.”