Did Actress Pam Grier Actually Witness Lynchings as a Child, as She Claimed on 'The View
Executive summary
Pam Grier told The View that, as a child in Ohio, her mother would pull her away from scenes of people “hanging from a tree,” and said the site now has a memorial (Grier’s on-air account) [1]. Public records and multiple contemporary fact-checking reports note that the last documented lynching in Ohio occurred in 1911—decades before Grier’s 1949 birth—making the literal claim of witnessing a documented lynching in Ohio as a child highly unlikely based on available historical records [2] [3].
1. What Pam Grier said on The View and how outlets reported it
During an MLK Day appearance on The View, Grier tearfully recounted that her mother would tell her and her brother “Don’t look, don’t look” because “there was someone hanging from a tree,” adding that “they have a memorial for it now” and that the memory still triggers her [1]. Mainstream outlets including Entertainment Weekly, BET, Cleveland.com and Yahoo reported Grier’s emotional on‑air recollection without immediately disputing her personal account [1] [4] [5] [6].
2. The historical record in Ohio and why critics say the claim doesn’t hold up
Multiple fact‑checkers and conservative outlets pointed out that the Ohio Lynching Victims Memorial and historical compilations list the last recorded lynching in the state as June 27, 1911, meaning documented lynchings in Ohio ended decades before Grier was born in 1949; outlets such as AOL, The Daily Caller and OutKick used that timeline to conclude her specific claim “crumbles with basic fact‑check” [2] [7] [8]. Critics have seized on that chronological mismatch to argue Grier could not literally have walked past a documented lynched body in Columbus in the 1950s [9] [10].
3. Small exceptions, ambiguities and alternative historical incidents
Some reporting notes isolated, later incidents that complicate a simple timeline: a 1932 extrajudicial killing in South Point, Ohio, is mentioned in legal summaries—still 17 years before Grier’s birth—and other older incidents occurred elsewhere in the region, but those do not place lynchings in Ohio during the 1950s when Grier was a child [2]. Available sources do not document a verified lynching in Columbus in the 1950s nor confirm the specific memorial Grier referenced; mainstream coverage repeated her statement that “they have a memorial for it now,” but the reporting does not independently corroborate the memorial’s location or the exact event she described [1] [5].
4. Memory, trauma, lived experience and how journalists should weigh them
Several outlets and commentators pushed back against immediate online ridicule, arguing that a Black woman’s traumatic recollections should not be dismissed out of hand; The Root and BET noted that readers and listeners may be quick to debunk lived experience with Google searches, and that trauma can shape how memories are encoded and narrated [11] [4]. At the same time, fact‑checkers emphasize that extraordinary claims about specific historical events should map onto documentary records when available, and here the documentary record in Ohio appears inconsistent with the literal claim as recounted [2].
5. Where the reporting leaves the question and the responsible conclusion
The public record available in the cited coverage shows Pam Grier did tell The View she witnessed a lynched person as a child and that a memorial exists, and it also shows documented Ohio lynchings ended decades earlier than her childhood—creating a clear factual tension between her personal account and historical records [1] [2]. Without independent archival evidence tying a verified mid‑20th‑century lynching to the place and time Grier described or a clarification from Grier about location, date, or whether she was referring to a different kind of racially motivated killing or a memorial from another jurisdiction, the claim cannot be corroborated; reporters and readers must therefore treat the literal interpretation as historically unlikely while acknowledging Grier’s emotional testimony and the broader, well‑documented history of racial terror in America [2] [11].