A Black 18-year-old college student was lynched on a playground 95 years ago. His nephew just accepted his posthumous degree

By Dalia Faheid, CNN

(CNN) — As Imam Plemon El-Amin stood on stage at Morehouse College in front of hundreds of people, donning graduation regalia his uncle Dennis Hubert never got to wear, all he could think was that Hubert would never be forgotten – even 95 years after he was killed.

Hubert, an 18-year-old African American divinity student at Morehouse College, was lynched in June 1930 by a mob of seven White men on the playground of a segregated Atlanta school. Last Sunday, the historically Black all-male college where Hubert was a rising sophomore awarded him a posthumous Bachelor of Arts degree in religion.

At the commencement ceremony, Morehouse President David Thomas called Hubert a “son of Morehouse, a martyr of justice, and what history now sees as the Trayvon Martin of the 1930s in Atlanta.”

El-Amin, who never met Hubert, says the moment reminded him of an Islamic saying: There are three things a person leaves behind after their death – their charity, knowledge and family members who pray for them.

“Many prayers were said in his name,” El-Amin said about the ceremony, where the 75-year-old accepted the posthumous degree on his uncle’s behalf. “Many people remembered him and were informed about his life and his legacy, and so the knowledge was there, as well as the charity of him sacrificing his life so that we would be more conscious of the value of young life and the value of human life, but also the value of justice.”

El-Amin’s family has had “a long tradition” of a “connection with Morehouse,” he said, with multiple generations graduating from the institution. Ten men in his family graduated from Morehouse and seven women graduated from its sister school, Spelman College.

“I was proud of Morehouse to give Dennis the honor, and I’m quite appreciative,” El-Amin said. “The whole Hubert family is really appreciative of that.”

Hubert’s family had well-established roots in the community: his father was a prominent preacher and his mother was the principal of the elementary school where Hubert was killed, according to El-Amin.

“For one of their promising children, who (was) a rising sophomore at the Morehouse College to be murdered just in cold blood … at that time, 1930, is saying that there (were) no human rights given to the people of Georgia,” El-Amin said.

Hubert was one of at least 38 lynching victims killed in Fulton County between 1877 and 1950, according to the Equal Justice Initiative. In Georgia, nearly 600 African Americans were lynched in that period – the second highest number of lynchings in any state.

“When we begin to address this history, when we begin to try to create remedies for the harm and suffering that terror violence and lynching violence created, I think we lay a path down that will help us move forward, which is why I was so pleased that Morehouse decided to award a degree posthumously to Dennis Hubert,” said Bryan Stevenson, the executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative.

Like many lynching victims, Hubert was a young man with a bright future ahead of him. When he was killed, the student had been the driver for John Hope, the first Black president of Morehouse.

“This is a recognition of Dennis as not only a human being, but also as someone that had made his mark and was beginning to make his mark at Morehouse, and was not able to make his full mark here in the city or in life, but that people have a high regard for him,” El-Amin said.

Young student’s killing shook the community

Less than 15 minutes after Hubert arrived at the Crogman School for Negroes that fateful evening on June 15, 1930, several White men attacked Hubert, falsely accusing him of insulting a White woman.

“What do you want of me? I have done nothing,” Hubert told the mob before one of the men shot him point-blank in the back of the head in front of two dozen witnesses.

Hubert’s killing sent shockwaves across the community, and the men were soon indicted in connection with his killing – accountability that was rare during that period, according to the Fulton County Remembrance Coalition. The defense argued the killing was “justifiable homicide” because of the alleged insult.

“The African American community was pushing for justice, and they did get some things that were first in terms of justice between Black and White folk,” El-Amin said.

Two days after the men were denied bail, the home of Dennis Hubert’s father, Rev. G. J. Hubert, was burned to the ground, according to the coalition. When a Black Baptist church held a fundraiser to rebuild the home and support prosecution of the men, a White mob bombed it with tear gas.

Days later, Dennis Hubert’s cousin, Rev. Charles R. Hubert, escaped an attempt on his life, and the Spelman College chapel was attacked, according to the coalition.

The men were acquitted of murder charges, and only two were convicted of lesser offenses, according to the coalition. One man received a sentence of 12 to 15 years for voluntary manslaughter, while another who confessed to firing the fatal shot received a sentence of just two years.

El-Amin’s mother, who was 12 when her brother was killed, scarcely spoke about Hubert because of the pain his loss had wrought. “He was probably her protector and her person that she looked up to,” El-Amin said.

But when she grew older and El-Amin became her caretaker, his mother would often call him “Dennis,” which was “quite moving” for El-Amin.

Though Hubert died 20 years before his nephew was born, the tragedy scarred the family for generations. Growing up as the only son in his family, El-Amin said his mother worried about him because she couldn’t bear to lose another family member.

Other family members moved out of Atlanta to escape the trauma. They were among more than six million Black people who fled the South to escape racial terrorism between 1916 and 1970, according to the coalition.

While Hubert’s death traumatized El-Amin’s family, he says he’s comforted by his faith. “Life doesn’t stop with death and … God rewards those who are oppressed and those who are unjustly murdered,” he said.

Morehouse graduates applaud the honor

Part of the tragedy of Hubert’s lynching was a lack of awareness surrounding his story among Morehouse graduates until only recently, several alumni said.

Michael Tyler, a 1977 Morehouse graduate, said he doesn’t “believe that any of my classmates, or anybody during our generation, was aware of what had transpired with Dennis Hubert.” A few years ago, Tyler learned of Hubert’s story when he visited an exhibit memorializing him at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama.

Sean Jones, a 1998 graduate who serves as president of the Atlanta branch of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, discovered that piece of his school’s history in 2021, then called for a discussion of it at the next alumni meeting. As a board member of the Fulton County Remembrance Coalition, Jones constantly advocated for the college to formally recognize Hubert and educate both students and alumni about his story.

“It’s personal, it’s painful, and … oftentimes it’s a scary thing, because some persons have nightmares about it once they hear this kind of history,” Jones said. “But it is something that must be discussed, must be highlighted.”

The lack of awareness about the tragedy – even among Morehouse graduates – made the college’s tribute that much more meaningful, Tyler and Jones said.

“It was extraordinarily significant and compelling, and something that I am exceedingly proud of my alma mater for doing – telling a story that had not been told in the public domain as it needed to be,” Tyler said.

With the long-overdue recognition, “(Hubert’s) memory will continue to inspire a new generation of Morehouse Men to serve with courage, speak truth to power, and uphold the ideals of equity and moral leadership in their respective callings,” a Morehouse College spokesperson said in a statement.

Remembering the young student

Morehouse had approached El-Amin about the decision to award Hubert a degree a year and a half ago and initially planned to recognize Hubert last year, he said. Morehouse’s faculty and students had nominated Hubert for the honorary degree, according to the college president.

“We remember the son who should have become a man here. We remember the voice that would have preached liberation. We remember the dreamer who was never given the chance to dream aloud,” Thomas said at the ceremony.

El-Amin believes the school’s decision to honor Dennis was influenced by the work of the Fulton County Remembrance Coalition and the Equal Justice Initiative to memorialize Hubert along with other lynching victims.

The organizations in 2021 collected soil from the site of Hubert’s killing – now the Crogman School Lofts apartment complex – and placed a marker there in his honor in 2022. A group of Morehouse students who attended the 2022 commemoration joined hands, encircled the memorial marker and sang the “Dear Old Morehouse” hymn in Hubert’s honor, Tyler recalled.

“Ninety-five years later, people are conscious of his life, which means he’s still alive, though not here with us physically or in body, but his life, his will, and he is providing inspiration for those of us left behind,” El-Amin said.

Such memorials may help educate future generations and prevent the return of past injustices, community members said. They’re especially important today “when there’s such a hostility in some spaces to learning the history of struggle and violence against Black people,” Stevenson, of the Equal Justice Initiative, said.

“We can see that those very, very terrible times are not that far away and can easily come back,” El-Amin said.

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