Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Horror of lynching laid bare
New National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Ala., honors 4,000 victims of lynching.
MONTGOMERY, Ala. — Visitors to the new National Memorial for Peace and Justice first glimpse them, eerily, in the distance: Brown rectangular slabs, 800 in all, inscribed with the names of more than 4,000 souls who lost their lives in lynchings from 1877 to 1950.
Each pillar is 6 feet tall, the height of a person, and made of steel that weathers to different shades of brown.
Viewers enter at eye level with the monuments, allowing a view of victims’ names and the date and place of their slaying.
As visitors descend downward on a slanted wooden plank floor, the slabs seemingly rise above them, suspended in the air in long corridors, evoking the image of rows of hanging brown bodies.
The memorial and an accompanying museum that officially opened to the public Thursdayin Montgomery are a project of the nonprofit Equal Justice Initiative, a legal advocacy group in Montgomery. The organization says the two sites will be the nation’s first “comprehensive memorial dedicated to racial terror lynchings of African Americans and the legacy of slavery and racial inequality in America.”
There is one column for each of the 800 U.S. counties where researchers uncovered lynchings. Most of the roughly 4,400 killings happened in the South, but states coast-to-coast are represented.
Bryan Stevenson, the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, said he wanted to create a space for people to confront and “deal honestly with this history,” just as South Africa has sites about apartheid and Germany memorializes victims of the Holocaust.
“We don’t have many places in America where we have urged people to look at the history of racial inequality, to look at the history of slavery, of lynching, of segregation,” said Stevenson, who is black. The memorial opens the same week that Alabama marks Confederate Memorial Day, an official state holiday in which state offices will close.
The first installation visitors see up close comprises statues of six slaves with chains around their necks, lash marks on their backs. A mother, face twisted in horror, cradles an infant in one arm and stretches out her other hand reaching for something, or someone, outside her grasp.
Beyond the sculptures are the monuments to those who lost their lives to “racial terror” lynchings after the Civil War. A section of epitaphs gives the brief story behind some the names:
“Fred Rochelle, 16, was burned alive in a public spectacle lynching before thousands in Polk County, Florida, in 1901.”
“David Walker, his wife and their four children were lynched in Hickman, Kentucky, in 1908 after Mr. Walker was accused of using inappropriate language with a white woman.”
Relatives of Thomas Miles Sr., a black business owner lynched in Shreveport, La., in 1912, visited the site Monday. First they visited the museum, where dirt taken from the site of several lynchings, including Miles, is displayed. Then they stopped by the memorial.
“I was crying. I felt anger. I felt frustration. I wanted to talk. I wanted to be quiet. There were so many emotions,” said Shirah Dedman, who grew up knowing only that her great grandfather was lynched and that her family had fled the South because of it.
The museum accompanying the memorial is called Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration. It is located on the site of a former slave depot in downtown Montgomery, and seeks to explore slavery’s legacy.
“You are standing on a site where people were warehoused,” announces a statement written on the first wall visitors see as they enter.