'A way we resist': Quilts honor victims of racial violence
ABC News
A quilt exhibit at Jackson State University honors dozens of lives lost in the U.S. to racial violence
JACKSON, Miss. -- Long after he was killed, Myrtle Green-Burton wouldn't let anyone wear her 17-year-old son's high school track team jacket.
James Earl Green, an aspiring Olympic runner, was supposed to receive the green and yellow coat at his graduation in Mississippi half a century ago. It became a symbol of his life — and her loss, said his sister Gloria Green-McCray.
“She just kept it until it dry-rotted because that was all she really had to remember his dream — his vision,” Green-McCray said of her mother.
A cross-stitch portrait of Green wearing his track jacket is now included with 115 others in a quilting project dedicated to memorializing lives lost to racial violence in the U.S. The two quilts are open for public viewing on weekdays through Dec. 17 at Jackson State University’s Margaret Walker Center.
