Ida Wells-Barnett, a fierce, 19^th-century critic of lynching, once listened to a reading of lynching victim names and said, “They had no requiem save the night wind, no memorial service to bemoan their sad and horrible fate.”

Now, in many corners of the region and in many different ways, lynch victims are being remembered. Silence and inaction are no longer the rule. I suspect Wells-Barnett would approve.

The latest of these efforts is a book added to the catalog of the University of Virginia Press last week. Lynching in Virginia: Racial Terror and its Legacy will be published this spring.

Gianluca De Fazio, an associate professor at James Madison University, has collected 11 essays that, in the words of the publisher, “uncover the history and examine the legacy of lynching in Virginia.”

I am proud to be one of the contributors and pleased that Arthur Jordan’s story will soon have a wider audience. But Jordan’s is not the only requiem to be told.

The book also includes essays by:

*Brendan Wolfe, who describes the lynching of John Henry James in Charlottesville in 1898.

*Tom Costa and Zoe Crihfield, who document the lynchings in Wise County.

*Dolores Flamiano, who details how three miners in Clifton Forge were hanged by a mob in 1891.

*The Alexandria Community Remembrance Project, who describes what the city of Alexandria has done to remember Joseph McCoy (1897) and Benjamin Thomas (1899), both of whom were hanged from lampposts downtown.

The publisher describes the contributors as a diverse group of academics, historians, community activists, journalists and an attorney. De Fazio edited the project and wrote the introduction. W. Fitzhugh Brundage, a lynching scholar at the University of North Carolina, wrote the afterword.

The cover, done in black and white, reminds me of a set of smashed dinner plates. Perhaps it is meant to symbolize the chaos and loss associated with lynching.

Virginia did not have as many lynchings as other Southern states. Still, more than 100 people were lynched here between 1866 and 1932.

“These essays represent a small part of the growing effort to come to terms with the role Virginia played in perpetuating America’s national shame,” according to the catalog.