ko bragg

if you don’t read anything else in this caption, read this: go interview your family before they become ancestors.

im so blessed to have had to honor to do just that, and to tell a family story buried under generations of trauma for @theatlantic. it’s both online and in the June print issue (#linkinbio)

….

Mississippi immediately felt like home to me. and now i know that’s because it’s always been. every migration away from this land has been a step toward the full-circle moment of reclaiming home.

i started my journalism career in the very same county my ancestors are from. it’s a place where generations of my family lived and worked the land and loved on each other. it’s also where tragedy struck.

in 1888, my great-great-great uncle Bob was lynched by a mob of more than 200 white men. he was accused of refusing to step off the sidewalk when he encountered a white man and woman walking to church. later, he found the white man standing amongst a group of other white men, and unloaded his clip in broad daylight, killing a white doctor—allegedly of course. we can’t know if any of this is true. it was national news and every paper from the NYT to the Boston Globe peddled the same narrative. only one black paper wrote about him and called my uncle Bob a martyr.

but what we do know, is that my great great grandfather Ike was with him that day. for some reason the lynch mob spared him. and without that gesture, our branch of the family tree never would’ve grown. as my auntie says: “we almost didn’t make it in this world.”

a generation or so later, my family would leave Mississippi behind, moving further and further north as part of the great migration. there was opportunity for them and elsewhere was also great loss in leaving their only homeland behind. my ancestors’ trauma also prevented them from talking about what happed to my uncle Bob. it’s been my Auntie, my mother’s sister pictured above, and her commitment to genealogical research that revealed the legacy of our uncle Bob to us. she’s my hero and every moment she’s shared with me to tell this story has been healing.

thank you to the iconic @_olivia_joan_ for the photos and the care 💖