Civil rights lawyer seeks to mark sites of lynchings across South
His group has found 700 incidents that previously had not come to light
MONTGOMERY, Ala. — Bryan Stevenson was driving to a jailhouse meeting in the morning gloom, through stands of loblolly pines and sweet gum trees, when he spotted the mammoth Confederate flag unfurled along Interstate 65, near a town called Clanton.
He flinched. And looked away: He’d seen the image too many times.
“It’s an insult,” Stevenson, 55, said of the banner at Confederate Memorial Park and Museum. “It evokes memories of how those rebel flags were brought out whenever people started to talk about integration.”
The sight of that blood-red flag also reminded Stevenson of a personal mission: The Harvardeducated black lawyer and greatgrandson of a slave wants to erect his own civil rights symbols across the South.
3,959 documented lynchings
His plan is to place memorial markers at lynching sites, where black men, women and children were strung from trees and hanged from telephone poles, sometimes at the rate of one per week, for “offenses” that could be as trivial as playing music too loudly or failing to tip a hat to a white man — or for nothing at all.
Stevenson’s nonprofit Equal Justice Initiative earlier this year released its own accounting of America’s lynching era, documenting 3,959 such incidents of “systematic domestic terrorism” between the end of Reconstruction in 1877 and 1950, at least 700 more than had been previously reported.
The markers will represent a new kind of memorial in a part of the country that is replete with tributes, such as the flag along I65, to the Southerners who fought and died for a cause that included the right to hold blacks in slavery. Stevenson’s memorials will each mark the place where a person died, reminding those in the present of the terrible past.
The plan has taken on new symbolic significance in the wake of last month’s fatal shooting of nine African-Americans, apparently by an avowed white supremacist, in a church in Charleston, S.C.
Since then, the Confederate flag flying on the South Carolina State House grounds has been under growing attack. On Tuesday, South Carolina’s Senate gave final approval to a bill to remove the flag. Other Southern memorials, to Confederate officers and even former Ku Klux Klan leaders, have also come under new scrutiny.
Doug Jones, a former U.S. attorney who led the prosecution of two former KKK members for the 1963 Birmingham church that killed four young girls, said he knows the battles that lie ahead for Stevenson.
“People will say, ‘Why go back to the past?’ Just like they did when we reopened the church bombing prosecution,” he said. “But you never close those chapters, which still sear in the black community.”
Recently, Stevenson successfully lobbied the city council in the town of Brighton, a black suburb of Montgomery, to mark the 1908 lynching of a black worker there.
Seeking a change in attitudes
His goal is to change the dialogue on race and narrow the gap he is convinced is at the root of conflicts in places like Ferguson, Mo. — attitudes he says date back nearly two centuries.
“There’s still this presumption of guilt assigned to African-Americans from people inherently worried about the dangerousness and criminality of black men,” Stevenson said. “It’s a burden. The police have menaced, threatened and followed us all our lives.”
According to the research in the justice initiative’s report, the biggest number of lynchings occurred in Georgia and Mississippi, while the highest rates were in Florida, Mississippi, Arkansas and Alabama. Blacks were lynched for knocking on a white woman’s door, refusing to remove an Army uniform after World War II and bumping into a white girl while running for a train. Often, Stevenson said, the hangings became public carnivals designed to instill fear.
The spectacles were as vicious as any modern Islamic State video. The report describes one lynching in Dyersburg, Tenn., where a 24-year-old farmworker accused of raping a white woman had his eyes gouged out and a hot poker iron shoved down his throat before he was castrated and burned alive over a slow fire.
‘We don’t want to talk about it’
The report avoids showing the so-called “strange fruit” of black men swinging from a rope, images that Stevenson says help perpetuate the insult. A calendar published by his group, highlighting significant dates in the fight for racial equality, instead shows a 1963 image of a female civil rights marcher, crouching as she is pounded by water shot from Birmingham police.
While Germany used public dialogue to overcome its Holocaust legacy, Stevenson says, “In America, we do just the opposite … We don’t want to talk about it; we don’t even want to think about it.”
In 30 years in the legal profession, he has argued a half-dozen cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. As a young lawyer, he once met civil rights icon Rosa Parks, who made a prophetic observation as he described his life mission of racial equality.
“That’s going to make you tired, tired, tired,” she told him.
So far, the lynching marker project has been slow going. While there has been some support, Stevenson has also met with what he calls “low-level hostile menacing resistance.”
“What do you want?” one writer asked him, as Stevenson recalls it. “I’ll tell you what you should get: A .357 beside the head.”