NEW ALBANY, Ind. (WDRB) -- A church that once symbolized hope to enslaved people continues to try and right what is wrong.
Second Baptist Church has been on New Albany's Main Street since before the Civil War. The church is located across the river from Louisville, which in the 1850's, was home to hundreds of enslaved people.
Jerry Finn, with Friends of Town Clock Church, said the congregation of the 1850's was committed to helping enslaved people find freedom.
"They really wanted to be actively engaged in decrying the scourge and evils of slavery in this country," Finn said. "The ladies of the church were collecting medicines and bandages, and clothing, and even money for those trying to escape."
Finn said the spirit of the church lives on now as the church continues to push for an end to racial violence.
This weekend, the building next door to the church is holding a temporary traveling exhibit called "Unmasked: The Anti-Lynching Exhibits of 1935 and Community Remembrance in Indiana."
"The struggle against that violence, usually not just through protests, but using art and artworks, and power of memory," exhibit curator Alex Lichtenstein said.
The exhibit shows the horrors of the lynchings during the Jim Crow era.
"It's a somber, emotional experience," Dr. Jimmy Butts said.
Butts is a Black Studies scholar, and connects the demonstration of power over Black people through lynching to a more modern problem.
"I find that you can see parallels with that when it comes to mass incarceration," Butts said. "The struggles for re-entry (to society). The way that you are ostracized from society. The way that people feel like they have a right to discriminate against you."
When he was in high school, Butts was convicted of a felony. When he was released, he said he could not re-enroll in school, and barriers to re-entry sent him down a negative path.
"Which would eventually lead me to doing five years and three months in prison," Butts said.
Now on the right path, in the fall, he'll be a professor at a college in Texas. He joined others on Friday night to honor those who have lost their lives to lynching and other forms of racial violence, a list that is still growing.
Finn said they are praying that one day, that will come to an end.
"That regardless of color of skin, we are all children of God, and we as a community need to make sure that we treat all of humanity in that manner," Finn said.
The "Unmasked" exhibit is open on Saturday at the Underground Railroad Visitors Center on 312 East Main Street in New Albany.
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