America still ignores the black experience
The most unlikely expression of the unsettled past in the “Cradle of the Confederacy” is not the duelling monuments to civil war and civil rights that line the capital’s gracious Dexter Avenue. It is a few miles from downtown, more subtly, on Ann Street.
The school is one of those standard midcentury, low-slung red-brick institutions. From behind, it looks like an abandoned warehouse of smeared windows and cracked walls.
In front, though, a life-size figure stands on a whitewashed pedestal, hatless and bearded, right hand holding his gloves, left hand on his sword. It is Robert E. Lee.
When Robert E. Lee High School opened in September 1955, no one here would have questioned the man and his monument. Rosa Parks would not spark the seminal Montgomery bus boycott until December. In the Southland, General Lee was the deity of the Confederacy, forever.
I did not come to Montgomery to see Robert E. Lee High School, whose Latin motto declares: “Let us not be unconcerned about the future.” I had come to see the new National Memorial for Peace and Justice, the most arresting statement on race and redemption in America.
But talking to Bryan Stevenson, its founder, the subject turned to Robert E. Lee High School, which I had happened upon that morning. Did I know, he asked, that 84 per cent of its students are African-American?
Other questions: What does it say to students passing a statue celebrating a champion of slavery, a corrupt, cancerous institution? What does it do to them?
Stevenson is a visionary in a cardigan. He laments that this country has not acknowledged its history of institutional terror and racism.
His response is this memorial, resting in the folds of a grassy hillock above the Capitol.
You see this kind of haunting memorial in Germany, South Africa and Rwanda, killing fields all, but not in the United States. Folks here would prefer to avoid that conversation.
This is the story of the 3,959 victims of lynchings in 12 southern states from 1877 to 1950. It was a reign of terror upon blacks with the acquiescence, even encouragement, of the state. The purpose was to threaten, intimidate and punish blacks for imagining a world in which they could be citizens — from voting to sitting at a lunch counter.
The memorial holds 800 rusting ochre pillars, which bleed when wet. Each represents a county where a lynching took place. It records the names of men and women of colour who were murdered by whites, usually by hanging, for any offence: speaking out of turn or challenging authority. Or, charges such as rape and murder, without evidence or due process.
It was rule by mob — often preceded by torture and followed by mutilation. A carnival of violence, captured in ghoulish black-and-white photographs of smiling spectators.
Walk among the pillars. They stand before you, then ascend gradually. Soon they are above you — dangling corpses, unreadable, unknowable and unspeakable.
Stevenson, a lawyer who runs the Equal Justice Initiative here, a legal organization, uses artless words that are not part of the nation’s vernacular. He describes the nearly six million who fled the South in the last century not as migrants but “refugees.” They were seeking asylum in foreign lands called Chicago or Detroit.
The blacks of America were the Jews of Europe, drawn from the corners, bent and broken, enduring a holocaust of slavery, segregation and insecurity.
But in a country that has a national Holocaust museum in Washington, and smaller community ones that sprout like franchises in strip malls, the black experience is ignored. This is why Stevenson created the monument, and the Legacy Museum nearby: to raise awareness of this past in a place with little truth and less reconciliation.
The reality is that the monuments here celebrate the Lost Cause, the glory of the noble struggle and its heroes, like Robert E. Lee.
Raze them all. Let them fall. And, finally, let Robert E. Lee High School be as concerned about its past as its future.
Andrew Cohen is a journalist, professor and author of Two Days in June: John F. Kennedy and the 48 Hour That Made History.