Presbyterian College alumna Olivia Aldridge ’17 sheds light on forgotten lynching victims

Presbyterian College alumna Olivia Aldridge ’17 sheds light on forgotten lynching victims

NPR health reporter Olivia Aldridge, a 2017 graduate of Presbyterian College, delivers an address on the lynchings that took place in late 19th century Travis County, Texas, during a presentation at her alma mater on Jan. 30.

Olivia Aldridge ’17

Olivia Aldridge, a 2017 graduate of Presbyterian College and senior health reporter for NPR station KUT in Austin, Texas, returned to her alma mater to share an unsettling but crucial history.

In her presentation, “Names We Don’t Know,” Aldridge detailed her investigation into an 1894 racial terror lynching in Travis County, Texas, where three black individuals—two men and a woman—were taken by a jail by a white mob and brutally executed. Their names remain unknown.

The event, Aldridge explained, is memorialized at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Ala., but the victims’ identities and life stories have been lost to time.

“It’s just very, very powerful and very heartbreaking, and I think it’s a part of our history we need to pay attention to,” she said of her visit to the memorial.

In her investigative work for KUT’s ATXplained project, Aldridge sought to uncover details about the lynching, encountering a landscape of missing records, media bias, and historical silence.

Presbyterian College alumna Olivia Aldridge '17 shows a slide of the sign in Austin, Texas, memorializing the lynchings of three innocent African Americans in 1894 during a presentation at the her alma mater on Jan. 30.A memorial without names

The ATXplained initiative allows Austin residents to submit historical questions about their city, and Aldridge’s investigation began with one such inquiry: Could anything more be discovered about the three individuals listed only as “unknown” on the Travis County monument at the Equal Justice Initiative’s lynching memorial?

To answer that question, Aldridge traced the history of the lynching, which occurred in August 1894. The victims—a black woman who had worked as a nurse for a white family and two black men accused of being her accomplices—were forcibly removed from a jail outside Austin by a mob. They were tied to stakes in a field and shot to death.

“There was no evidence to support that these people were guilty,” Aldridge explained.

Despite the brutality of the crime, no local newspapers in Austin reported on it at the time, Aldridge said. Instead, the story only surfaced in publications overseas.

“At least three publications covered the incident, all of them foreign newspapers–two based in England and another in Ireland, she said. “It appears that someone sent a wire dispatch from Austin to report the lynchings. We don’t know who that person was, but without them, we might have no record of this event at all.

Aldridge said this was not uncommon, as American newspapers frequently ignored or downplayed lynchings, while international journalists, encouraged by pioneering anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells, reported on them more openly.

“Although lynchings often did follow accusations of rape and other violent crimes, Wells’ reporting proved that many of these accusations were false,” Aldridge said. “But the accused never got their day in court, soquestions about guilt and innocence were never settled for the public record. There are so many of these kind of vagaries. Was the person guilty? Did the newspaper tell the right story? Did the event actually happen?”

Silence and erasure

Aldridge’s research also led her to historical archives and local death records in Travis County and surrounding areas, but she found few official documents related to the case. Texas did not require counties to keep death records until 1903, meaning any record of the victims’ deaths was either lost or never created.

Further complicating the search was the fact that the flagship newspaper of Austin, the Austin American-Statesman, did not acknowledge the lynching at the time. However, it did print a letter from then-Gov. Jim Hogg, who denied the lynching had ever taken place.

A later editorial in the Statesman took issue with Britain’s interest in exposing racial violence in the U.S., dismissing concerns about lynching and mocking British activists for their so-called moral outrage. “We would advise the committee not to interfere with the lynching,” the editorial read, “but wait until the curtain drops upon the tragedy.”

Remembering what was lost

Though official records were scarce, community efforts have helped ensure the lynching is not forgotten. In 2017, a historical marker was placed outside Wesley United Methodist Church in East Austin, a historically Black neighborhood. The marker, spearheaded by the Austin NAACP, stands as one of the few public acknowledgments of the crime.

The Rev. Sylvester Chase Jr., the church’s pastor at the time, welcomed the marker but noted that many in Austin were reluctant to place it on public property.

“If the church can’t speak the truth, who can?” Chase told Aldridge in an interview. “But people didn’t want it. Even in a progressive city like Austin, people don’t want to be reminded of this history.”

Despite the discomfort, the marker has become a point of reflection.

“Every day when I see people stop and read it, I say thank God that marker is here,” Chase told Aldridge. “They’re going to read that marker regardless of whether they come to church here or know the name of the church. They might not want to know about Jesus Christ, but they’re going to stop and read that sign.”

Aldridge’s takeaway

For Aldridge, the story of the 1894 lynching represents a broader issue of historical accountability.

“Three people were killed in this crime,” she said. “Three human beings. We don’t know their names. We don’t know how old they were. We don’t know if their loved ones were able to bury them. It feels like a basic human dignity to have your memory preserved. To at least get the simplest honors our culture offers the dead. An obituary, a headstone with your name on it. For these three people, this is as close to those honors as they get.”

While her investigation could not uncover the names of the three individuals lynched in Travis County, Aldridge’s work ensures their story is not forgotten.