In 2008 I served as a guest producer for the documentary “The Last Lynching” created by the team at  Ted Koppel on Discovery:

Just weeks before the history-making 2008 presidential election, the first in which any political party has nominated an African American as its candidate, Discovery Channel presents a one-hour special on race in America  (The New York Times article about the documentary).

The Discovery Channel production incorporated elements from a 2007 documentary short I co-produced with filmmaker Isaac Brown for Current TV (now Al Jazeera America).  “Lynched and Forgotten” examines a Florida town’s modern-day perceptions of race and its own history on this topic.

“A black man had more risk of being lynched in Florida than any other place in the country.” – Florida historian Jack Davis.

Both films reference reporting from my 2005 series of newspaper articles (article two of the series linked here with photography by Danny Ghitis) that revisit the history of lynchings in the U.S. South, specifically in Florida. That year the U.S. government formally apologized for our nation’s legacy of lynching violence. Perplexed as to why it took Congress so long to apologize for decades of vigilante mob murders, I spent months pouring over 80-year-old newspapers, recording oral histories, and documenting grave sites where lynching victims were buried.