In the spring of 1917 a crowd of 3,000 people gathered to watch in Memphis as a lynch mob burned and decapitated Ell Persons, a Black man who was awaiting trial after he was beaten into confessing to raping and killing a 16-year-old white girl.
Under a bill introduced by Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.), the site near the Wolf River and others near the city in Tennessee would be studied as possible additions to the National Park Service.
https://www.eenews.net/articles/lynching-sites-in-tenn-proposed-as-new-national-park-sites/