Family connection drives Joi Brown’s work with Jefferson County Memorial Project

It was written in the stars for Joi Brown to become the new director of the Jefferson County Memorial Project — or rather, it was written in the hanging steel slabs.

She was walking through the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery in 2018, shortly after the museum opened up. The memorial features 800 steel slab monuments, one for each county in the United States where a racial terror lynching took place, and each slab has a list of names engraved on it. The names are of more than 4,400 African-Americans who were lynched in a reign of racial terror in America from the end of Reconstruction in 1877 until about 1950.

When Brown was walking through, she noticed something peculiar. On the Blount County marker, she saw her second-great-grandfather’s name, a name which she learned about three years prior from researching her family tree.

“Brown is such a common last name, so I kind of rationalized it,” she said. “I was like, ‘No, it’s got to be a different Mack Brown. Surely it’s not the same one that’s in my family tree.’”

When she got home that evening, she looked at her ancestry.com account. Sure enough, the dates from the memorial matched up with the Mack Brown in her family tree. From there, she was able to do more research on her ancestor and found newspaper articles about his death in 1891.

“The newspaper articles describe the murder from a white reporter’s perspective,” she said. “It explained that he was ‘taken care of’ as a punishment for attacking a white woman the day before.”

One headline that stuck out to her referred to her ancestor as “a black demon.” She still keeps the two newspaper articles.

“I think that was worse than seeing his name on the marker ... for that, 100 years later, to be how your name remains.

“I don’t even know the words to explain it. It’s just eye opening. As an African American, you know that history is in your tree somewhere. But I guess you area little naïve because you seriously think, ‘No that could never — that didn’t happen to my family.’”

She felt a desire to do something, she said. When she learned about the Jefferson County Memorial Project and was asked if she wanted to be involved in its creation, she said she thought “Absolutely. There’s no way I couldn’t be involved with something like this.”

The Jefferson County Memorial Project is a grassroots coalition that aims to research Jefferson County’s 30 documented racial terror victims and educate the public on the importance of its history. The National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery has duplicate slabs for each county, and the JCMP is working to retrieve Jefferson County’s slab and setup a memorial at Lynn Park. JCMP also advocates for reform where racial injustice still exists.

After being a dedicated member of JCMP’s Core Coalition since day one, Brown began transitioning to her new role as director of the project in September.

“I don’t consider myself a historian, and honestly, if you would have told me 10 years ago if I would be doing this work, I never would have believed that — I have a degree in art,” she said. “I would consider myself an introvert, so I never would have seen myself doing something this serious as racial terror. But I think more people need to speak up who have something to say.”

Each day with JCMP is different, and that’s part of what Brown loves the most, she said. Some days are full of correspondences and connecting with JCMP’s community partners. Other days she is out in the community, working with students and collecting research on Jefferson County’s 30 documented victims.

Brown’s most vivid memory thus far from working with JCMP was the placement of the project’s first historical marker at Sloss Furnaces, she said. There was an overwhelming crowd of 300 people.

“It made it feel like we were actually getting somewhere, and people were listening,” she said. “More people were showing up to our table to learn about the history.”

Outgoing director Abigail Schneider said the core coalition unanimously chose Brown to step up as director.

“Joi deeply understands both the importance of better telling the history of racial violence in Jefferson County as well as the sensitivity and respect that needs to be brought to do this work well,” Schneider said. “The core coalition and myself are so excited for Joi and know she is going to lead JCMP in wonderful and thoughtful new ways.”