Editor's Briefing: Black Archives shares stories of local history you didn't learn in school

More than 120 years before George Floyd died beneath the knee of a Minneapolis police officer, Erastus Brown died at the end of a lynch mob’s rope in Union, Missouri. Brown was going to get medicine for his sick young daughter when accused of hitting a white woman in the head with a stone. A mob entered the city, pulled Brown from the jail in the middle of the night and hung him from a willow tree while a crowd watched. The next day, the only uproar in Union came from townspeople upset that the…