Levi Harrington lived his life in a Black man's world laced with the unfathomable fear of lynching.

He died 139 years ago last week, roped at the neck and slung over a beam on the Bluff Street Bridge by a white mob in Kansas City's West Bottoms — murdered at the age of 23.

Saturday a procession of mourners in a windswept rain took turns with a garden trowel scooping from a bin of soil collected from the ground near where he died and they ceremoniously filled two glass jars bearing his name.

The crowd, summoned by the Community Remembrance Project of Missouri, then got into their cars and drove to the Black Archives of Mid-America's museum in Kansas City's 18th and Vine District where the jars of soil were installed in the elegant mahogany wood shelves of the museum's memorial to victims who lived and died by lynching's ultimate terror.

Read more:

Levi Harrington’s 1882 lynching memorialized with soil collection, funeral procession — The Kansas City Star

A brass band, in festive New Orleans style, serenaded the gathering, celebrating the joy of life that Harrington — a husband and father of five children — surely pursued and lost. He is one of at least 60 Black victims lynched in Missouri, one of at least 3,500 lynched in America.

The memorial at the Black Archives, titled The Story is in the Soil, is a “sacred space to break the silence” shrouding the deep legacies of lynching in Missouri, wrote Staci Pratt, the Remembrance Project’s co-liaison to the Equal Justice Initiative, which is inspiring similar memorials throughout the nation.

Memorializing victims of racial violence, Pratt said, can move communities to “meaningful dialogue about race and justice.”

The new shelves in the somber room where Harrington’s jar of soil sits stretch along each side of the room, leading out from a painting on the far wall of Black American faces below the ghastly images of lynched bodies.

The broad empty spaces on the shelves are left to invite other Missouri communities to collect their own jars.

“Those people who were victims of racial murder must not remain anonymous, hidden parts of our past,” wrote Carmaletta Williams, executive director of the Black Archives of Mid-America.

“They were real,” she said. “They had breath and bones in their bodies. They had families. Their lives were taken from them quickly, unjustly, without fanfare or even farewell.”

After the speeches Saturday, the jazz band played and Harrington’s life was honored with love in a ceremony that means to compel Kansas City to the hard work of healing — tearing back the scars as white and Black Americans gape at racial terror’s insidious reach through time, making it present and powerful.

By Joe Robertson/LINC writer