The markers are about the size of a man. The color of bricks made
from Alabama’s red clay, they hang from the roof, one for every county
in America where a person was lynched.
Appearing first at eye level, the markers read like headstones. But
as the floor descends, they hang ever more ominously overhead, until
visitors are forced to crane their necks — like the spectators who once
gawked at the mutilated bodies of the black men and women who had been
hung.
The National Memorial for Peace and Justice,
the nation’s first major memorial to the victims of lynching during the
era of Jim Crow, opened this week in Montgomery, Alabama. It’s intended
to help our country confront the racial atrocities of the past so that
we can begin the path toward reconciliation.
The memorial is the culmination of years of research by our friends at the Equal Justice Initiative,
(EJI) a legal aid organization that fights for racial justice. Its
researchers pored through countless archives to document the extent of a
racist terror campaign that lasted for some 70 years and, for a period
of three decades, averaged two or three lynchings a week.
EJI founder Bryan Stevenson and his staff identified 4,400 victims of
lynching, and paid tribute in the memorial to the thousands more whose
names will never be known.
“There was a very deliberate effort to cover the truth about
lynching,” said NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund President
Sherrilyn Ifill from the stage this week at EJI’s two-day Peace and
Justice Summit. Ifill continued:
There was a compact within the white
community not to talk about it. In black communities, you didn’t talk
about it because of fear. The black community had to fight to keep the
story alive, but we didn’t have video. You can’t unsee Walter Scott
running, getting shot in the back. You can’t unsee Eric Garner getting
choked to death. Gaslighting that we didn’t see what we saw undermined
the black community, but now, we can see.
Near the memorial, EJI’s companion Legacy Museum
tells more of the story. Situated along Montgomery’s historic
riverfront, it sits just a block from what once was one of the largest
slave markets in the country and on the site of a warehouse where slaves
were imprisoned as they were bought and sold. The museum connects the
past of white supremacy, enslavement and lynching to the racial
injustice and police brutality we still see today.
For the writer and scholar Jelani Cobb, the present is intimately related to that past:
For the work we do in the present, it
seems possible to see the fingerprints of those lynchings with Stephon
Clark, Philando Castile, Sandra Bland losing their lives at the hands of
the police in a way they shouldn’t. Lynching and mob violence, the
roots of it go deeper than the roots of the country itself. Slavery’s
roots outsource violence to the community, to reinforce the place of
black people in this country. The implications of that steady drip of
terrorism over those years, the nadir after slavery, the institution of
Jim Crow, sharecropping, the revocation of the right to vote, they
produced a new form of slavery. But I also think of these as Ida B.
Wells years, years when W.E.B. DuBois produced some of his best work,
years when black fraternities and sororities were launching their vision
of social justice. That’s why it’s important to understand EJI in that —
the nadir — the point when our greatest heroes and challengers have
done their most important work.
We’re incredibly proud of our neighbors at EJI for their work in
raising the National Memorial for Peace and Justice on a six-acre site
overlooking the Alabama Capitol.
As Michelle Alexander said at the summit this week, “What’s happening
is the birth of a new nation, a time in our history when Confederate
monuments are going down and memorials like this are going up.”
Thanks to the EJI staff’s dogged pursuit of the truth, we’re able to
honor here the victims of lynching in the city we share with them:
Ike Cook, 08/10/1890
Oliver Jackson, 03/29/1894
Robert Williams, 02/15/1896
John Dell, 10/07/1910
Harry Russell, 08/18/1915
Kit Jackson, 08/18/1915
Miles Phifer, 09/29/1919
Robert Croskey, 09/29/1919
John Temple, 09/30/1919
Wilbur Smith, 03/11/1920
Grant Cole, 12/16/1925
Otis Parham, 06/17/1934
