Thanks, Dr Roscoe Moore
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A Lynching Memorial Is Opening. The Country Has Never Seen Anything Like It. | 
| Replicas of the monuments inside the National Memorial for Peace and Justice are lined up in rows like coffins, intended to be taken back and erected in the counties where lynchings were carried out. Audra Melton for The New York Times |
| | MONTGOMERY, Ala. — In a plain brown building sits an office run by the Alabama Board of Pardons and Paroles, a place for people who have been held accountable for their crimes and duly expressed remorse. | Just a few yards up the street lies a different kind of rehabilitation center, for a country that has not been held to nearly the same standard. | The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which opened today on a six-acre site overlooking the Alabama state capital, is dedicated to the victims of American white supremacy. And it demands a reckoning with one of the nation’s least recognized atrocities: the lynching of thousands of black people in a decades-long campaign of racist terror. | 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. | The magnitude of the killing is harrowing, all the more so when paired with the circumstances of individual lynchings, some described in brief summaries along the walk: Parks Banks, lynched in Mississippi in 1922 for carrying a photograph of a white woman; Caleb Gadly, hanged in Kentucky in 1894 for “walking behind the wife of his white employer”; Mary Turner, who after denouncing her husband’s lynching by a rampaging white mob, was hung upside down, burned and then sliced open so that her unborn child fell to the ground. |
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| The Legacy Museum in Montgomery, a companion piece to the memorial, explores how lynch mobs sought to preserve slavery. Audra Melton for The New York Times |
| There is nothing like it in the country. Which is the point. | “Just seeing the names of all these people,” said Bryan Stevenson, the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, the nonprofit organization behind the memorial. Many of them, he said, “have never been named in public.” | Mr. Stevenson and a small group of lawyers spent years immersing themselves in archives and county libraries to document the thousands of racial terror lynchings across the South. They have cataloged nearly 4,400 in total. | Inspired by the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin and the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, Mr. Stevenson decided that a single memorial was the most powerful way to give a sense of the scale of the bloodshed. But also at the site are duplicates of each steel column, lined up in rows like coffins, intended to be disseminated around the country to the counties where lynchings were carried out. People in these counties can request them — dozens of such requests have already been made — but they must show that they have made efforts locally to “address racial and economic injustice.” | For Mr. Stevenson, the plans for the memorial and an accompanying museum were rooted in decades spent in Alabama courtrooms, witnessing a criminal justice system that treats African-Americans with particular cruelty, or indifference. | Since 1989, the Equal Justice Initiative has offered legal services to poor people in prison, toiling away in a city awash in Confederate commemorations (Monday was Confederate Memorial Day in Alabama), in a state with the nation’s highest per capita death sentencing rate. Nearly every staff member is a lawyer with clients in the prison system, and they have continued to work a full schedule of legal defense work even as they painstakingly compiled the names of the lynched and planned the memorial. | [Read more] |
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A Lynching’s Long Shadow | 
| A possible burial site of Elwood Higginbottom in Oxford, Miss. Joshua Rashaad McFadden for The New York Times |
| | Tina Washington can’t remember being told that white men lynched her granddaddy back in 1935. Somehow she’s always known. The crime echoed in her father’s character, in his watchfulness and distant love, in the yawning void left in place of memory. As a child, she tried to pry answers from her tight-lipped parents. “Where is my granddaddy?” she would ask. “I want to know my granddaddy.” Now, at 39, she asked different questions but mostly to herself. Would her father have gone to college if his daddy had lived? What did her granddaddy look like? What sparked his murder? Who were his people? She had no photos. Nothing. | But one hot and clear afternoon in September, a day before the 82nd anniversary of her paternal grandfather’s death, Washington sat in the back seat of her sister’s car ready to crack open her family’s painful history. Her father, E.W. Higginbottom, sat beside her in a white dress shirt and cuff links, and her sister and brother-in-law, Delois and Irven Wright, rode up front. Washington’s children — Trinity, Bailee and Rico — squabbled quietly in the S.U.V.’s third row. | They had left the suburbs outside Memphis, Tenn., and were headed south, past deep green woods and an old railway line, toward Oxford, Miss., where Washington’s grandfather lived and died. The family planned to meet there with staff members from the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation, a Mississippi nonprofit, and tour sites significant in her grandfather’s lynching: the county courthouse, the killing grounds and two graveyards where he might be buried. | Washington, who wore rectangular glasses and a sleek ponytail, teaches high school Spanish and possesses an educator’s enthusiasm for history. She has visited Tuskegee University and George Washington Carver’s birthplace. She has walked across the Selma bridge, where Alabama state troopers beat nonviolent voting rights activists in 1965, and traveled to Booker T. Washington’s grave. The broad sweep of black history has come easily; her black family’s experience remained frustratingly elusive. “I’ve kind of seen the house where my mama lived as a child,” she said a few days earlier. “It was built over, but I kind of know where it is. I can go there. But I don’t know any of my daddy’s history.” | Higginbottom was 4 when the mob came for his father. He is now 87, with eyes set in a perpetual glaucoma squint and the strong voice of a younger man. He is the last remaining family member to have seen his father alive, and the thought of returning to Oxford was gnawing at him. | [Read more] |
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