Oprah Winfrey gets first look at memorial to lynching victims in Montgomery

Taylor Ford | Montgomery Advertiser

MONTGOMERY -- Oprah Winfrey gave 60 Minutes viewers a sneak peek Sunday of a new memorial in downtown Montgomery dedicated to thousands of lynching victims.

The memorial, which is located at 417 Caroline St., has 805 steel markers, each bearing the names of people who were killed.

Each marker represents a state county and contains the names of victims of lynching from that area. The memorial takes up six acres in the heart of Montgomery, “perhaps the best known city in the struggle for civil rights,” the release states. Alabama was also the scene of 361 documented lynchings.

Efforts to build “The National Memorial for Peace and Justice” were led by Bryan Stevenson, a lawyer who founded the Equal Justice Initiative.

“Asked by Winfrey why he chose to commemorate lynching as opposed to other injustices done by white people to the Black Community, he says the murderous acts were a way for whites to maintain political control over African Americans, who were supposed to get the right to vote after the Civil War,” the CBS News release states.

“Lynching was especially effective because it would allow the whole community to know that we did this to this person … a message that if you try to vote, if you try to advocate for your rights … anything that complicates white supremacy… and political power, we will kill you,” Stevenson said.

In addition to the monuments displaying the names of the victims, the team has collected jars filled with soil from mMore:

any places where lynchings took place. Winfrey and cameras record descendants of lynching victim Wes Johnson collecting soil from an Alabama cotton field. The 18-year-old was accused of assaulting a white woman, arrested and then taken from his cell by a mob before his trial. He was shot and then hanged from a tree.

Stevenson tells Winfrey, “Something happened here that was wrong … unjust, and too few people have talked about it. … So that’s what we want to do today. We want to recognize the wrong that was done to Wes Johnson.”

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The memorial will be paired with a museum, called The Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration, that will also open in downtown and explore slavery, lynching, segregation and modern inequality issues, according to a past EJI news release.

Melissa Brown contributed to this report.