I’ve never been a bigger fan of Alabama football than during that campaign last December: “Anything, please, anything to get people thinking differently about Alabama, even if only for a few days.”

People from Alabama living outside the state have an unofficial job as P.R. rep for it. The moment someone attacks your state you have to start the spin job like Sarah Huckabee Sanders. “Listen, I know you’ve heard a lot about the elected officials where I’m from, but I assure you that they don’t represent the views of everyone who lives there. It’s full of good people who do the right thing more often than not.”

The most important work in Alabama is happening south of Birmingham in the Black Belt. Aside from black women leading the charge to get Doug Jones elected to the Senate against Mr. Moore, the biggest indicator of an effort to get in the walls and extinguish the past lies in Montgomery and the new National Memorial for Peace and Justice. Less than a mile away is the equally riveting Legacy Museum.

The Peace and Justice memorial was erected to honor those who died during lynchings, not only in the Jim Crow South but also as far west as California. The more than 4,000 names that they could find, each have their place engraved somewhere on the grounds. Tribute is also paid to the scores of unnamed victims of lynchings. Even more jarring than the names on the wall are the reasons some of the dead were lynched. Black people were lynched for doing anything from annoying a white woman to simply voting. Literally, just voting.

These lynchings remain of America’s greatest acts of domestic terrorism.

The museum’s “no selfies” policy is fitting considering that this place feels less like a memorial and more like an ongoing wake for the spirits of those who were wronged. It has the energy of a burial ground. And the same amount of silence.