As we make our way down Peachtree Drive, the houses begin to give way to trailers as the dusty road turns into a dirt track.
It leads to a lake, trees lining its banks.
This is where John B Smith, a 73-year-old civil rights activist from Atlanta, Fabian Medea, my South African husband, and I get out of the car.

We take in our surroundings. The serenity of this place - rippling water, rustling leaves and a clear blue sky - belies its ugly past.
On June 4, 1895, a young man by the name of Jim Powell was lynched here.
It must have been hot then, too, one of those sweltering summer evenings, when Powell, an African American farmhand, allegedly entered the room of 15-year-old Mary Bussey. According to accounts, she screamed and he ran. 
Some hours later, his lifeless, badly beaten body dangled from a tree at this lake.

John is on his knees, digging vigorously with a small trowel.

"We recognise that you have lived, Jim Powell, and we feel your pain," he says, before depositing some earth into a large glass jar with Jim's name on it and the date and place where he died.

"The world now knows that you lived," says John, pausing to look across the lake.