Tomorrow in Montgomery, Alabama a memorial will open that’s dedicated to an often overlooked and horrific chapter in American history. Thousands of African-Americans were lynched in this country in what The New York Times calls “a decades-long campaign of racist terror.”
And now The National Memorial For Peace And Justice will make sure all Americans know the victims of white supremacy.
In Montgomery for the press preview of the National Memorial for Peace & Justice, the country’s first memorial dedicated to the victims of lynching. Everyone should make the time to visit. pic.twitter.com/old9FTRKEs
— John Hammontree (@JohnHammontree) April 23, 2018
From The Times:
- At the center is a grim cloister, a walkway with 800 weathered steel columns, all hanging from a roof. Etched on each column is the name of an American county and the people who were lynched there, most listed by name, many simply as “unknown.”
- The columns meet you first at eye level, like the headstones that lynching victims were rarely given. But as you walk, the floor steadily descends; by the end, the columns are all dangling above, leaving you in the position of the callous spectators in old photographs of public lynchings.
Can you imagine going to an event where you’re eating deviled eggs, drinking lemonade and watching a lynching? No, right? Well, tens of thousands of white people did — for decades. https://t.co/mLswCybmg0 pic.twitter.com/7s0Jjd3kxL
— Jonathan Capehart (@CapehartJ) April 24, 2018
Also note an excellent 60 Minutes piece on the memorial which you can see here.
(FYI–Disturbing images)