Mr. Hartfield was dragged to a big gum tree and strung up. A rain of bullets from the crowd seemed to reanimate the corpse, which finally fell to the ground and was burned to ashes. Some took body parts as souvenirs.

In the Ellisville of today, little recalls the moment, other than the Hotel Alice. In a mayoral portrait gallery at City Hall, for example, the officeholder in 1919 is absent. And at Jones County Junior College, Roll 539 of the microfilm for the local newspaper, The Laurel Daily Leader, jumps from May 27, 1919, to Aug. 22, 1919 — as if the June lynching of Mr. Hartfield had never happened.

But it remained seared in collective memory. “I never saw him in my life, but I remember his name,” Ms. Kirkland said, adding, “Could have been my father.”

By then, it appears, the family had already endured mayhem in East St. Louis, where thousands of Southern black men like her father found work in industrial plants. In 1917, when Ms. Kirkland was 9, rioting white men, incensed by the job competition and changing demographics, burned down black neighborhoods and shot at those who fled. Dozens of black residents, maybe many more, died, and thousands were left homeless.

She can see it now. The National Guard in the smoke-choked streets. The fires, the panic. That one deaf man shot for not hearing an order to halt.

“Killed him right there,” she said, eyes wide in horror. “I hate to talk about it, but it’s true.”

The family moved on to the small manufacturing city of Alliance, Ohio, still chasing employment and harmony. But in the early 1920s, you might open the local newspaper to find a by-the-way notice that the Ku Klux Klan would be rallying in the Alliance city park this evening, and that “a large attendance is expected.”

One night, Ms. Kirkland said, three Klan members came to the family’s door, holding torches and wearing those big white hoods. “There were only two of us on that street,” she said, meaning black families. “So they were going to” — her voice fell to a whisper — “burn us up.”