How to remember a stain on American history

A Gubernatorial “pardon” is a poorly named mechanism to redress the terror deaths of Black lynching victims, conjuring as it does the idea of absolution in cases where guilt — which generally was never or poorly established in the first place — was beside the point. The indisputable crimes, and the irrefutable guilt, belong not to the victims of the lynchings but to their perpetrators, the mobs that killed with the active assistance or complicity of local officials and law enforcement.