Path of reconciliation: A walk through the nation’s first lynching memorial

Blossoms of pink and marigold mark the entrance of the first national memorial to America’s lynching victims. To one side of the garden, a "memory wall" built from bricks crafted by slaves in Montgomery 158 years ago shows how long the effects of racial injustice can persist.

Through the entrance and past a quote from the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. — “True peace is not just the absence of tension; it is the presence of justice” — wood turns to gravel underfoot as you find yourself at the bottom of a hill and the beginning of a path.

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice will open to the public this week and many will find themselves standing on that gravel looking up the hill at 800 rusting columns, a "presence of justice" for the more than 4,000 known African-American victims of racial terror, as well as the countless whose names may never be printed.

There are Georges and Sams, Lillies and Lindsays, names long unacknowledged now blazed into corten steel, columns the size of corpses organized by the county where the lynchings occurred. The floor gradually slopes downward until the names hang overhead like the bodies they once belonged to.

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“Arthur St. Clair, a minister, was lynched in Hernando County, Florida, in 1877 for performing the wedding of a black man and white woman,” reads a plaque on the wall.

“Grant Cole was lynched in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1925 after he refused to run an errand for a white woman,” reads another.

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“The first corridor, the monuments are eye level. We want people to have an intimate relationship with these structures. We want you to read the names and touch them. The intimacy created in Corridor 1 is necessary to appreciate what happens next when you get into Corridor 2 and the monuments begin to rise,” said Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative and mind behind the memorial. “You see this violence and terror lifted up. To me that’s important because the people who committed these acts of violence could have buried these bodies in the ground. They could have erased the evidence and done even more without any threat of accountability. But the entire point of lynching was to raise up this violence. They wanted the entire African-American community to see the battered, bloodied bodies they destroyed.”

America’s history of lynching cannot begin without a confrontation of slavery. Likewise the path toward the memorial begins at a sculpture of seven slaves, one with infant in arm reaching for a man who, still shackled, has been separated from the group.

EJI’s Legacy Museum also opens this week on the site of a former slave warehouse where visitors can follow the narrative from slavery to present day mass incarceration.

Those who visit will find out that 12 million Africans were kidnapped during the Transatlantic Slave Trade era, and after a federal law prohibited the import of slaves, domestic slave trade separated half of all families at markets such as Montgomery’s Artesian Basin, now known as Court Square.

In the Alabama capital, which closed state government offices Monday in observance of Confederate Memorial Day, two-thirds of the population in 1860 were slaves (23,710 people).

“I’ve had a couple people tell me when they got to the memorial, ‘This is the first slave sculpture I’d ever seen in my life,’” Stevenson said. “We want everyone to understand this history. We are not defined by it, we are not doomed by it, but we cannot ignore it. We have to confront it. There’s a better America still waiting.”

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The path toward the memorial continues. It looks lengthy from the bottom, but your arrival at the first column comes quicker than expected. A glance across the lawn at the family of seven serves to remind how far you’ve come, but how close that past remains.

“There’s a kind of community we haven’t achieved yet. We can’t achieve it if we’re unwilling to tell the truth about our past,” Stevenson said.

That truth is etched into each marker. The first encountered at the memorial belongs to Lamar County. Or perhaps it belongs to Ed White, John Hayden, John Bonner, Louis Bonner and Albert Anderson, five lynching victims whose names may have never been written if not for the research completed by the EJI.

Further ahead is a column for Monroe County, the home of Alabama author Harper Lee whose "To Kill a Mockingbird" similarly forced a reflection of racial politics.

The columns continue through years and counties. Nearly 25 percent of those lynched were accused of sexual assault and 30 percent were accused of murder, but African Americans were often beaten, burned or hanged before an investigation could ascertain the truth.

Each column of corten steel rusts differently, an individuality lynching victims did not receive in the press. A metallic smell of fresh steel somehow makes the history all the more palpable. Unobtrusive seating throughout the columns provides space for solemn reflection and introspection.

Designed by Mass Design Group, which also designed Rwanda’s Kigali Genocide Memorial and Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, the path of reconciliation is designed with deliberate steps of acknowledgement.

Perhaps most important are the columns that will not be permanent fixtures at the exhibit. For each county name that hangs atop the hill, a separate marker lays in the gravel behind it waiting for the community to accept both its history and its monument.

Stevenson described it as a real-time "report card," a tool of atonement for a culture of killing that could have been labeled genocide if the murders were not so individual and scattershot.

"Thousands of African-Americans are unknown victims of racial terror lynching whose deaths cannot be documented, many whose names will never be known. They are all honored here," reads the wall of the final corridor.