Dateline: Montgomery, Alabama, April 12, 2019
The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which opened to the public on April 26, 2018, is the nation's first memorial dedicated to the legacy of enslaved black people, people terrorized by lynching, African Americans humiliated by racial segregation and Jim Crow, and people of color burdened with contemporary presumptions of guilt and police violence.
Set on a six-acre site near downtown Montgomery, the memorial uses sculpture, art, and design to contextualize racial terror.
The site includes a memorial square of 800 six-foot monuments to symbolize thousands of racial terror lynching victims in the United States and the counties and states where this terrorism took place.
From 1877 to 1950, over 4,400 African Americans were lynched by groups of two to over 10,000 white people. Most of these were conducted in broad daylight.
Black people were lynched by hanging, burning, shooting, drowning, stabbing, and beating. They were falsely accused, presumed guilty, and killed without trial or investigations.
These lynchings were directly tied to the history of enslavement and white supremacy. They were intended to terrorize black Americans and enforce racial hierarchy.
Lynching was sanctioned by law enforcement and elected officials. Members of the mobs frequently documented their atrocities by posing for photographs with a dangling, bloodied, or burnt corpse. (You can find such photographs on the Internet.)
Lynchings in America were not isolated hate crimes committed by rogue vigilantes. Lynchings were targeted racial violence perpetuated to uphold an unjust social order. Lynchings were terrorism.
The legacy of suffering and injustice still haunts us.
The Equal Justice Initiative hopes that this memorial will inspire individuals, communities, and this nation to claim our difficult history and commit to a just and peaceful future.
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Walking among the hanging monuments that identify those who were lynched, I encountered a series of signs with information about certain individuals. Here is a summary of some of those signs.
States in which these people were lynched: Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Oklahoma, Minnesota, Nebraska, Tennessee, South Carolina, Louisiana, Ohio, Mississippi, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Missouri, Texas, Colorado, and others.
Persons lynched: the person intended to be lynched; members of that person's family; others who were available because the intended victim couldn't be found; persons acquitted of murder charges; successful businessmen; ministers who performed weddings between a black man and a white woman; wives who complained about the lynching of their husband; men, children, teenagers, women, pregnant women, elderly women.
Size of mobs: more than 1,000 people; more than 1,000 men, women, and children; at least 3,000 people; a mob of 5,000 people; a mob of 10,000 people; up to 15,000 people.
Some of the reasons that the victims were lynched:
- not allowing a white man to beat him in a fight (1887);
- "standing around" in a white neighborhood (1892);
- walking behind the wife of an employer (1894);
- refusing to abandon land to white people (1895);
- knocking on a white woman's door (1904);
- leaving the farm where he worked without permission (1908);
- suing a white man who killed his cow (1909);
- rejecting a white merchant's bid for cottonseed (1916);
- writing a note to a white woman (1919);
- asking a white woman for a drink of water (1926);
- reprimanding white children who threw rocks at her (1933);
- kissing a white woman on the hand (1936);
- addressing a police office without the title "mister" (1940);
- insisting that a white co-worker return a shovel (1941);
- voting (1948).
"History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again."
