Bishop Tonyia Rawls Says America Can’t Turn 250 Without Remembering Who Built It

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An NAACP flyer campaigning for the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, which passed the U.S. House of Representatives in 1922, but was filibustered to defeat in the Senate. Dyer, the NAACP, and freedom fighters around the country, like Flossie Baily, struggled for years to get the Dyer and other anti-lynching bills passed, to no avail. Today there is still no U.S. law specifically against lynching. In 2005, eighty of the 100 U.S. Senators voted for a resolution to apologize to victims' families and the country for their failure to outlaw lynching. Courtesy of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

Some Exhibits to Come – One Hundred Years of Jim Crow

Bibliography – One Hundred Years Of Jim Crow

Claude, age 23, just months before his 1930 murder. Courtesy of Faith Deeter.

Freedom’s Heroes During Jim Crow: Flossie Bailey and the Deeters

Souvenir Portrait of the Lynching of Abram Smith and Thomas Shipp, August 7, 1930, by studio photographer Lawrence Beitler. Courtesy of the Indiana Hisorical Society.

An Iconic Lynching in the North

Claxton Dekle – Prosperous Farmer, Husband & Father of Two

Ancient manuscripts about mathematics and astronomy from Timbuktu, Mali

Some Exhibits to Come – African Peoples Before Captivity

Shackles for Adults & Children from the Henrietta Marie

Some Exhibits to Come – The Middle Passage

What I Saw Aboard a Slave Ship in 1829

Life After Hate: A Former White Power Leader Redeems Himself

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June 8, 2026

Nate Esparaza, The Black Wall Street Times

Through its month-long 250 Years of Resistance campaign, the Charlotte-based organization is challenging the versions of American history that often celebrate freedom while overlooking the people who fought hardest to expand it. The campaign centers Black, queer, trans, immigrant, and faith-rooted communities whose contributions have too often been treated as footnotes rather than foundations.

For Bishop Tonyia Rawls and her late wife, Gwendolyn Woodard-Rawls, who founded the organization together, that work begins with truth.

“The goal here has never been erasure,” she said. “It has been control.”

Control of whose stories are taught. Control of whose labor is valued. Control of whose bodies, communities, and futures are treated as worthy of protection.

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