Alabama memorial captures the scale of racial terror in the U.S.

MONTGOMERY, Ala. - We are first confronted by names. Joseph Jones, Charlotte Harris, Adam King.

On a hill overlooking the birthplace of the civil rights movement and a wide bend in the Alabama River, where black families were torn apart and sold into slavery, is a new memorial dedicated to the victims of lynchings.

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, recently opened by the Equal Justice Initiative, documents the lynchings of more than 4,400 African-Americans, often public acts of torture carried out by white mobs.

Related: A family reclaims the narrative of lynching

It is as affecting – and necessary – as any memorial erected in the U.S. to date, including Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington and Michael Arad’s memorial at ground zero in New York. For the first time, a national memorial describes the scale of racist terror perpetrated in the cause of white supremacy, not as isolated acts of violence but as a holocaust.

The outdoor memorial and an accompanying museum draw a direct line from enslavement and lynching to the persistent racial inequality plaguing the country today, including segregation and mass incarceration. From a place deep in the South, they connect a shameful history to present-tense Milwaukee, to #BlackLivesMatter and a moment of national reckoning.

“I am persuaded that we are not yet free in America, that we are burdened by this history,” says Bryan Stevenson, executive director of the EJI, a nonprofit legal advocacy group that works to end racial injustice, particularly in the criminal justice system.

“It’s an important turn for us as a nation to really be aware that telling these stories is not a bad thing,” says Reggie Jackson, head griot, or storyteller, for America's Black Holocaust Museum in Milwaukee. Jackson, who calls Milwaukee “the most difficult place to live in the country if you are a black person,” likens the new memorial to those in Germany that recount the history of the Holocaust.

Remember the names

The Montgomery memorial is created from a field of steel columns, rusted to the color of mud. Stepping inside is like slipping into a crowd, at least initially. The steel shapes are human scale, and each one lists the names of people murdered.

The names are common, like neighbors. Henry Smith. Arthur Jordan. Frank Dodd. The letters are at eye level, where one can run a finger across them. Last names recur, hinting at who was kin. Others are listed only as “unknown,” their names lost to history. The dates tell us who died together and who died alone.

At the top of each column is the name of the U.S. county where these African-Americans – mostly men, but women and children, too – were killed for the pettiest of perceived infractions, like walking behind or annoying a white woman. For some counties, lynchings were so common that the names had to be made especially small to fit them all onto the memorial pillar.

People at the EJI who investigated the lynching deaths, adding about 800 to the list of previously known cases, are careful to point out that thousands of cases will likely never be documented.

Walking through the memorial, the floor begins to slope downward and the steel columns rise overhead. The space grows darker and the names become harder to read and touch. Everything is still, lifeless. The simple act of looking up – echoing the gesture of tens of thousands of onlookers to these crimes – has the power to implicate.

“The whole point of lynching was to raise up this violence,” says Stevenson, who was named a MacArthur Foundation “genius” in 1995. “They wanted the entire African-American community to see the battered, bloody bodies that they had destroyed.”

Lynchings were a way to threaten and terrorize, he says. Fingers and toes were amputated for keepsakes, picture postcards of the events were sold. Newspapers published advance announcements. Families packed picnics and made an outing of it, hoisting young children up onto shoulders to witness the violence.

Displaying the evidence

The danger of any powerful memorial is that people will believe they have done something by simply feeling something. This memorial, designed in collaboration with MASS Design Group, ensures that will not be the case. Duplicate steel pillars are laid out in the grass around the main memorial, like caskets awaiting transport home after a war. Each of about 805 counties represented is being challenged to claim and install its memorial back home. In five or 10 years, what’s lingering on the lawn will stand as a report card of sorts about which communities owned their histories and which did not.

“The long-term vision of a lot of this work is about how we address this history in order to inform the present and the future,” says Brad Pruitt, director of Milwaukee's America's Black Holocaust Museum. “How do we clearly articulate our history in order to help us heal?”

The Milwaukee museum, which will reopen a physical space later this year, was founded by James Cameron, who was born in Wisconsin and survived a lynching in Indiana when he was 16 years old. Cameron died in 2006 at age 92.

The connections between the past and the present are laid out like a legal case in the nearby museum. From the kidnapping of Africans and the transatlantic slave trade to the incarceration of young black men today, the argument is that the persecution and murder we associate with the era of slavery never ended but evolved.

The Legacy Museum, too, is sacred ground. “You are standing on a site where enslaved people were warehoused,” read the words on the wall as one enters.

Hologram-like video installations allow visitors to peer into cells and hear what the voices from the past have to tell us about the cruelty of selling human beings. “Lord, hear my cry,” says one woman, speaking about how her sister’s children were taken from her. “This trouble won’t last always,” she says in the end. Another woman sings gospel songs.

In the museum, lynching deaths are marked with jars filled with the soil gathered from the sites of the murders. Placed side by side on a shelf, each jar bearing a name, it is both a display of evidence and a poignant memorial. Various shades of brown dirt, mostly from the South, are on display.

In response, Jackson says he would like to gather soil near the corner of Water and Buffalo streets, where in the early 1860s a black man named Marshall Clark was lynched by a mob in Milwaukee after a white man had been killed in a fight. Clark’s is the only known lynching in the area, Jackson says.

A photograph depicting the lynching of Cameron's friends, Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, in Marion, Ind., in 1930, surrounded by smiling white faces, is part of the museum's exhibits, according to the Indianapolis Star.

Related: Last-known lynching in Indiana included in National Memorial for Peace and Justice

The Montgomery museum chronicles the various turns of history. For instance, Richard Nixon campaigned on a law-and-order agenda in the years following the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and related civil unrest, capitalizing on widespread fear and anger. Once elected, Nixon declared a war on drugs that resulted, starting in 1971, with a dramatic increase in incarceration rates.

A place of liberation

Near the end of the journey through the museum, visitors are confronted with videos of unfairly incarcerated men and women. Visitors sit down in front of glass windows, pick up telephone receivers, as if visiting a prisoner, and listen. Some of the men and women thank us for visiting, for listening.

“What would you do,” asks Anthony Ray Hinton, who spent 30 years, more than half his life, on death row for a crime he didn’t commit, “if the court cared more about your skin color than the facts of your case.” Stevenson and others with the EJI fought for decades to win Hinton’s freedom.

“My only crime was being born black, or being born black in Alabama, ” Hinton wrote for The Guardian, on the occasion of the opening of the museum, calling his conviction a “legal lynching.” “Everywhere I looked in this courtroom, I saw white faces – a sea of white faces. Wood walls, wood furniture and white faces.”

One of the last things one sees in the museum is a video of Hinton gathering soil at the site of a lynching for one of the jars at the museum, connecting the end of the story to its beginning in an unassailable way.

Seen within the context of a national debate about Confederate monuments dedicated to the leaders and architects of slavery, the new memorial and museum are a potent argument for reclaiming the narrative. Creating what the EJI calls a “sacred space for truth telling,” Stevenson says he wants the site to be a place of liberation rather than a place of punishment. A belief that animates his work as an advocate and lawyer, he says, is that no person or nation is the equivalent of their worst deeds.

Hundreds of people waited in the rain the day the sites opened, according to the Associated Press. The local newspaper, the Montgomery Advertiser, marked the occasion with a self-critical series about how it had failed the victims of lynching. Ava DuVernay, the Oscar-nominated filmmaker, told those gathered for a summit held to mark the openings that "every American who believes in justice and dignity must come here.”

Related: Editorial: Extinguish flames of hatred

Both the memorial and the museum combine the kind of forensic clarity typical of the civil rights lawyers behind the effort and the expressiveness of artists whose work is brought powerfully to bear throughout. Indeed, there is a noticeable commitment to the insight of artists, including Jacob Lawrence, Elizabeth Catlett, Sanford Biggers and Glenn Ligon.

When one enters the park area around the memorial, for instance, a connection is made to Africa through the work of Ghanian artist Kwame Akoto-Bamfo who created a life-size sculpture of chained and stumbling Africans. “Raise up,” a sculptural work by Hank Willis Thomas is on the grounds, as is a sculptural grove of stools named for Ida B. Wells, an investigative journalist who fearlessly crusaded against racist lynchings.

The very last thing you’ll see is a sculpture by Dana King dedicated to the memory of the women who kept the Montgomery bus boycott going and an invocation from poet Elizabeth Alexander. Part of Alexander’s redemptive verse reads:

You will find us here mighty.

You will find us here divine.

You will find us where you left us, but not as you left us.



Here you endure and are luminous.

You are not lost to us.

The wind carries sorrows, sighs and shouts.



The wind brings everything. Nothing is lost.

Mary Louise Schumacher is the Journal Sentinel's art and architecture critic. Follow her on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. Email her at mschumacher@journalsentinel.com.