A century after his death, Black man lynched in Indianapolis gets historical marker
Early on the morning of March 16, 1922, George Tompkins left his aunt and uncle’s home in Indianapolis for the last time.
Tompkins’ family said the 19-year-old Black man, a recent migrant from Kentucky who worked at a glass factory, had left in good spirits. After Tompkins was found dead near the White River with a noose around his neck and his hands tied behind his back, his body slumped against the sapling whose branches held the rope, the Marion County coroner told reporters that “Tompkins could not have hanged himself.” His family found no suicide note.
But Indianapolis police detectives claimed Tompkins had killed himself, and the coroner reported Tompkins’ official manner of death as suicide.
It took a century and a citizen-led excavation of the facts surrounding the young man’s death for the coroner’s office to overturn that decision in 2022. On the 103rd anniversary of Tompkins’ death Sunday, those same citizens unveiled a plaque telling the true story at Municipal Gardens park, near the wooded area where Tompkins was strangled to death.
A plaque commemorating the lynching of George Tompkins, a 19-year-old Black man who moved to Indianapolis from the South, now stands in Municipal Gardens park, near the wooded area where he was killed, at 1831 Lafayette Road in Indianapolis on March 16, 2025.
“This justice is not just about correcting history,” said Coroner Alfarena McGinty, who changed Tompkins’ legal manner of death to homicide in 2022 when she was the chief deputy coroner. “It is about shaping our future, where no one’s life is disregarded, where no truth is buried and where everyone’s personal humanity is honored in life and in death.”
Tompkins was one of at least 25 racial lynching victims in Indiana between 1866 and 1950, according to the Equal Justice Initiative, a civil rights organization in Montgomery, Alabama, that helped erect the national historical marker. In that timeframe more than 6,500 Black people across the nation were victims of lynching.
Tompkins’ death was brought to light by the Indiana Remembrance Coalition, an Indianapolis organization that tells stories of racial violence and racism. Indiana University anthropology professor Paul Mullins initially discovered the case, according to IRC member Phil Bremen. In 2022 the group dedicated a headstone to Tompkins’ previously unmarked grave in Floral Park Cemetery.
More: Exhibit reckons with Indiana’s racial violence through anti-lynching art
Marion County Coroner Alfarena McGinty holds a placard showing her decision in 2022 to change George Tompkins’ manner of death from suicide to homicide a century after his death at a ceremony at Municipal Gardens city park in Indianapolis on March 16, 2025.
The markers tell essential stories that “trouble the waters” of false histories, IU Indianapolis professor Joseph Tucker Edmonds said Sunday, alluding to the words of Black journalist Ida B. Wells.
Lynching “was an illustration of … the cardinal principle that no matter what the attainment or the character or the standing of the African American,” Edmonds said, “the laws of the entirety of the United States will not protect him or her against a white man.”
The plaque marking Tompkins’ death will soon become part of a remembrance garden with a walking path, art installations and flower beds at the city park at 1831 Lafayette Road.
Email IndyStar Reporter Jordan Smith at JTsmith@gannett.com. Follow him on X: @jordantsmith09
This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: New plaque tells story of Indianapolis lynching victim
