Lawrence’s NAACP chapter is welcoming the community to a marker dedication for 30 Black people who were buried in previously unmarked graves in Oak Hill Cemetery. A commemoration of the 1882 lynching victims will follow.
In March, Kerry Altenbernd, the chair of the Community Coordination and History Committee within the local NAACP, said there are likely more than 1,000 people who were buried on top of one another in Potter’s Field.
Alongside community partners and the city, Altenbernd’s team coordinated installation of 30 headstones with 31 names, plus years of birth and death, over the graves.
A corresponding digital archive will share those people’s biographies, written by KU professor emerita and historian Jeanne Klein. Read more about the project at this link.
The dedication will begin at 7 p.m. Wednesday, June 10 at Potter’s Field in Oak Hill Cemetery, 1605 Oak Hill Ave. The field is in the far northeast corner of the cemetery.
Following the dedication, the NAACP will host the annual event commemorating the men who were lynched by an all-white mob on June 10, 1882. Those men, Isaac King, George Robertson and Peter Vinegar, were all found in Potter’s Field.
The men were killed for defending Margaret “Sis” Vinegar, Peter’s 14-year-old daughter, who was raped by a white man. She, too, was arrested and almost killed by a mob that ultimately voted against her lynching by a margin of one. She remained in prison until she died of tuberculosis at 20 years old. She was not located, but her name will also be on a marker on her father’s plot.
The Lawrence community held a marker dedication for King, Robertson and Peter near Lawrence City Hall in 2022. A twin dedication ceremony saw a marker placed near Eighth and Kentucky streets for Margaret a year later.
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