Southern states have long welcomed tourists retracing the footsteps of the late Martin Luther King Jr. and others who opposed segregation. Now the Alabama city that was the first capital of the Confederacy is set to become home to a privately funded museum and monument that could make some visitors wince: a memorial to black lynching victims.
The nonprofit Equal Justice Initiative has announced it is building a memorial in the state capital of Montgomery devoted to 4,075 blacks its research shows were killed by lynching in the U.S. from 1877 to 1950. [...]
Equal Justice Initiative said the monument and museum also would help counter glorification, in some quarters, of the Confederacy across the South while telling the painful story of race in America. The law firm and its founder, Stevenson, represent death row inmates and advocates for racial justice.
The group already has erected bronze plaques around Montgomery to denote bygone slave markets; another group has built a memorial honoring civil rights martyrs, mostly African-Americans. Elsewhere in Montgomery, a marker explains the history of the church parsonage bombed while King lived there in 1956. [...]
Alabama tourism director Lee Sentell said the project has the potential to be important. But he said his agency will need to find out more about the new project before deciding whether to promote it alongside civil rights attractions such as the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute or the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, where marchers for voting rights were beaten by state police in 1965.
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