Actress Pam Grier Claimed On The View She Witness Lynchings In Columbus, Problem Is, The Last Lynchings Were In 1911

Monday’s MLK Day episode of The View took a familiar turn: emotional storytelling, zero fact-checking, and a panel more interested in nodding along than asking basic questions.

Actress Pam Grier was invited on the show and promptly set up by co-host Sunny Hostin to recount the racism she allegedly experienced growing up in Columbus, Ohio in the 1950s. What followed was a shocking story involving lynchings so frequent, Grier claimed her mother had to physically shield her children’s eyes from bodies hanging in trees.

The problem? The timeline doesn’t come close to adding up.

Hostin, fresh off earlier comments defending discrimination against white people, introduced Grier with a glowing monologue about “firsts” and “barriers,” before steering her directly into racial trauma:

“You faced a lot of racism growing up in Columbus, Ohio. How did that shape you?”

Grier initially spoke about segregation affecting her father, who served in the military. But the story quickly escalated into something far darker.

She claimed her mother would rush her and her siblings along, repeatedly warning them “don’t look” because someone was hanging from a tree nearby. Grier went on to suggest such scenes were common enough to warrant memorials and said the experience still “triggers” her today.

That’s when the facts quietly exited the conversation.

According to the Ohio Lynching Victims Memorial, the last recorded lynching in Ohio occurred in 1911 — nearly four decades before Grier was born. Even more inconvenient: that lynching took place in Cleveland, not Columbus.

Grier was born on May 26, 1949.

In other words, for her story to be accurate, she’d need to be well over 100 years old.

None of this raised an eyebrow on set.

Whoopi Goldberg nodded along. Hostin affirmed. And resident “conservative” Alyssa Farah Griffin offered no pushback whatsoever, instead awkwardly pivoting away:

“Pam, you’ve done too many extraordinary things to highlight.”

Translation: Let’s move on before anyone checks a date.

But the problems don’t stop there.

Hostin’s framing may have been wrong from the start. Public records — including Grier’s own Wikipedia page — list her birthplace as Winston-Salem, North Carolina, not Columbus, Ohio. The last documented lynching there? 1890.

That would put Grier’s alleged childhood memories even further into the realm of historical fiction.

Her biography also notes that shortly after her birth, her family moved to England due to her father’s Air Force assignment, then later to California and Denver — hardly the static upbringing described on The View.

Yet none of these inconvenient details mattered.

On a show that routinely claims to “speak truth to power,” an objectively false lynching narrative sailed through unquestioned — because it fit the preferred narrative.

On The View, emotion trumps evidence. And on MLK Day, apparently even basic chronology is optional.