People Who Inspire Us:
Karlos Hill
Dr. Karlos K. Hill refers to himself as a “community-engaged historian.” It’s a description he arrived at after a transformational visit to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, a memorial to the victims of lynching.
Karlos is Regents' Professor of African and American Studies at the University of Oklahoma and a nationally recognized expert on lynching in the United States. He has written three acclaimed books and founded the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Teachers’ Institute to help educators teach about the destruction of what was then one of the wealthiest African-American communities in the United States.
This past June he took part in Widen the Circle’s immersive education program in Germany for American activitists. Speaking to a group of German grassroots remembrance practitioners in Berlin, he told the story of his first visit to the the Alabama memorial:
“As I walk into the Peace and Justice memorial, I begin to see names of individuals that I have studied for many years… As I walk deeper in I’m starting to imagine the victims I’ve studied because I’m seeing their names on these steel posts representative of lynching…It’s then that I realized that I had never mourned the individuals that had been brutally killed by lynch mobs.
“I realized that I had never taken the time to even have the thought to know to mourn them because I had always thought about them as academic subjects to be studied, to be dissected, to be talked about with other historians.
“That chilling realization just knocked me over, and I said I can’t do this work any more that way, without recognizing the deep humanity of the people that I studied.
“It was no longer OK for me to just study the history. I had to care about the people impacted, affected about the history today.
“That’s where all of my energy for the memory work comes from, is bearing witness to the victims, survivors, and descendants of American lynching. “
More: Watch Using Local History To Counter American Racism and Antisemitism—Lessons from Germany, with Karlos Hill and Obermayer Award winner Gabriele Hannah.