Bryan Stevenson on the Brooklyn Museum’s “The Legacy of Lynching”

BRYAN STEVENSON ON THE POSSIBLY TRANSFORMATIVE DISCOMFORT OF ‘LEGACY OF LYNCHING’

THE ALABAMA-BASED Equal Justice Initiative has partnered with the Brooklyn Museum in New York City on the groundbreaking “The Legacy of Lynching: Confronting Racial Terror in America.” Newsweek spoke with Bryan Stevenson, the founder of EJI and a public interest lawyer, about the unsettling exhibition, one that confronts visitors with America’s history of exclusion, discrimination and brutality. As James Baldwin wrote in the quote that opens the show: “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

It’s interesting that there are no photos or art depicting lynching in the show. It focuses, instead, on its enduring effects. How did that idea come about?

EJI started investigating and documenting the phenomena of racial-terror lynching six years ago, in communities across the country, and in the process identified 800 more lynchings than had been previously recorded. When we published our report, we were blown away by the hundreds of letters and emails we got from the families of victims, but also from people whose relatives had participated in lynchings. We sensed there was a desperate need to talk more about this horrific era.

We tend to be very resistant to conversations about race or racial justice. It makes people nervous; they start looking for the exits. We all live in places where evidence of the history of bigotry can still be seen, and our silence is what allows it to continue. We can’t understand the police violence we see today, or the frustration about sustained inequality, without acknowledging this history. And we can’t understand racial-terror lynchings without understanding slavery.