May 27, 2018

The Lynching Memorial

     We were finally able to visit the newest memorial in Montgomery over the holiday weekend, the one opened last month by the Equal Justice Initiative to black victims of lynch mobs from the time after the Civil War to the 1950's and beyond.


Columns representing U.S. Counties in which lynchings took place hang from the ceiling, with the victim's names engraved.








It is a somber place, as you would expect, and I spotted one man with a little boy.

I imagined it was a talk about what lynching was. And why.







The Old Ship AME Zion Church across the street, with duplicate slabs.


 For each hanging steel column in the memorial there is a companion marker lying flat in another part of the property. EJI hopes officials with those counties will collect theirs, an set up a local memorial to their lynching victims.
     But it's not quite as simple as calling and paying the freight. EJI wants the counties to prove they're working to reduce racism where they live before they can collect their column,



 EJI suggests visitors buy their tickets online, though we showed up without one on Sunday Afternoon and were able to get inside within a few minutes. Remember that it is an open memorial, so rain can be a factor, and there is a companion museum at the EJI headquarters downtown---a 16 minute walk, they say, from the memorial. More information HERE.
     The memorial is actually called The National Memorial for Peace and Justice...though I suspect it will mostly be called the lynching memorial.

1 comment:

  1. Thanks for sharing this, Tim. My daughter and I visited the memorial a few days after it opened. Growing up in the South as I did, most of us whites understood the separation and the boundaries: the segregation, the separate water fountains, the impoverished black neighborhoods -- but most of us did not understand the fear, the terror, and the sheer danger of being black in America. The National Memorial for Peace and Justice is a timely and needed remembrance of our past and present social currents.

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