Vanderbilt Magazine, the flagship publication of Vanderbilt University, reported on an investigation featuring the assistance of Amy Mundorff of UT’s Forensic Anthropology Center.
A man was killed in a brutal racial incident in 1940, and his case was forgotten. The murdered man, Elbert Williams, was a member of the NAACP who organized meetings of African Americans in West Tennessee’s Haywood County. He was found in a river and buried withoutan autopsy in an unmarked grave. Now, Jim Emison, a retired attorney in Haywood County, is looking to uncover Williams’s grave—one of several unmarked plots in a certain cemetery. Mundoroff is assisting Emison in the effort to locate the grave.
Mundorff is an assistant professor of anthropology.