Alabama memorial to confront South’s troubled history of lynchings
MONTGOMERY, Ala. — Southern states have long welcomed tourists retracing the footsteps of Martin Luther King Jr. and others who opposed segregation. Now the Alabama city that was the first capital of the Confederacy is set to become home to a privately funded museum and monument that could make some visitors wince: a memorial to black lynching victims.
The nonprofit Equal Justice Initiative has announced it is building a memorial in the state capital of Montgomery devoted to 4,075 blacks its research shows were killed by lynching in the U.S. between 1877 and 1950.
The nonprofit’s director, Bryan Stevenson, said the aim is to help “change the landscape” of American racial discourse by openly acknowledging a painful past, much as Germany has Holocaust memorials and South Africa a museum on its past statesanctioned segregation — apartheid.
“I don’t think we can afford to continue pretending that there aren’t these really troubling chapters in our history,” Stevenson said.
Set to open next year on the site of a former low-cost housing project, the monument is to be accompanied by a museum a few blocks away exploring the history of blacks in America from slavery to the present.
Work is already underway on both. How they will be received is an open question.
Alabama tourism director Lee Sentell said the project has the potential to be important. But he said his agency will need to find out more about the new project before deciding whether to promote it alongside civil rights attractions such as the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute or the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, where marchers for voting rights were beaten by state police in 1965.
“It is a difficult subject for most all of us Southerners to contemplate because people who are alive today have never had to give this subject much thought,” Sentell said. He added of the memorial that “the execution of the details will either make people glad they visited the location or not.”
Not everyone is on board with a lynching memorial.
Marlin Taylor, an AfricanAmerican visitor from Spokane, Wash., was surprised by it.
“With the climate in America right now, I don’t know that that’s a good idea,” Taylor said at the civil rights memorial outside the Southern Poverty Law Center, a public interest law firm. “I feel like that could be more divisive than anything.”
But the Alabama commander of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, Jimmy Hill, supports it.
“Yes, it’s going to hurt some people,” he said. “There are some people who are going to see that and say they wish the story wouldn’t be told. But we are on the opposite side of that. We just want the whole story to be told,” Hill said.