Hollywood icon Pam Grier’s tearful Martin Luther King Day appearance on The View reignited a conversation no one wants to see politicized: the real, brutal history of racial terror in America. Grier told the hosts she remembered her mother pulling her away as a child because “there was someone hanging from a tree,” a harrowing anecdote that understandably drew gasps and a standing ovation from the studio audience.
That moment on live television was presented as both a personal memory and a lesson — “it triggers me today,” Grier said — and the left-wing media immediately wrapped it in moral certainty, using it to lecture the country about systemic evil. Viewers were asked to accept the story at face value and to accept the enforced narrative that any questioning equals insensitivity. Those instincts to weaponize pain for moral theater are exactly what skeptics on the right are rightly wary of.
Conservative outlets and observers have pushed back, not out of malice, but out of a demand for basic facts: investigative voices noted that historical records and lynching memorial databases do not show a documented lynching in Columbus, Ohio in the era Grier described. One conservative outlet even noted that authoritative projects that catalog these racial terror sites do not list a Columbus, Ohio lynching and that Ohio’s last well-documented terror lynchings date back to the early 20th century. Those discrepancies deserve answers, not a chorus of sanctimonious applause.
We should be clear: Pam Grier is a respected actress who experienced racism and hardship growing up in a military family that moved around, and her pain is real and worthy of respect. Biographical records show Grier spent significant time as a military child in places like Europe and Denver, which raises reasonable questions about the specifics and geography of the memory she shared on live TV — questions a responsible journalist would ask calmly, not shamefully. The fact that such a dramatic anecdote did not appear in her memoir further underscores why people want verification rather than instant deification.
What we are seeing is a predictable pattern: the media’s hunger for emotionally charged narratives that bolster a national guilt script, followed by reflexive suppression of inconvenient follow-up. The View and its fellow travelers treated the story as an unquestionable moral instrument instead of doing the work of corroboration. That is not compassion; it is pageantry. Responsible journalism — conservative or liberal — still requires the old-fashioned steps of verification, context, and sourcing. No one should be forced to choose between honoring victims and demanding truth.
Organizations that memorialize documented victims of lynching have done important work to preserve history and help communities reckon with past atrocities, and they are the very places citizens and reporters should consult when major claims are made. The Equal Justice Initiative and related memorial projects have cataloged and memorialized hundreds of sites and continue to be a resource for communities seeking to confront racial terror honestly. If a nationally broadcast claim about seeing a body in a tree is made, these are the first places journalists should turn.
Patriots of every race should want two things at once: justice and truth. Conservatives are not opposed to grieving history; we are opposed to politicized spectacle that uses unverified anecdotes to fuel division and to justify censorship of dissent. The decent response from the press and from cultural elites would be simple: treat the claim like any other newsworthy assertion — verify it, report the findings, and if it cannot be verified, say so honestly while continuing to honor the real victims of America’s worst chapters. Only then can healing be genuine and not just another performance for camera-ready virtue.
