Soon, however, on a six-acre site overlooking Montgomery’s Cottage Hill neighborhood, just a stone’s throw from the Rosa Parks Museum, the Memorial to Peace and Justice will serve as a national monument to the victims of lynchings. It will be the first such memorial in the U.S., and, its founders hope, it will show how lynchings of black people were essential to maintaining white power in the Jim Crow South.
The memorial is the brainchild of Bryan Stevenson, a lawyer who directs the Equal Justice Initiative, a Montgomery-based legal-advocacy organization. Two years ago, EJI completed an ambitious tally of the black Americans hanged, burned alive, shot, drowned, beaten, or otherwise murdered by white mobs from 1877 to 1950. EJI’s original report identified 4,075 victims, a sizable increase from previous estimates. Since then, the list of killings has continued to grow; it now stands at 4,384. [...]
The Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, the Kigali Genocide Memorial in Rwanda, and the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin are among the models for the new memorial and museum, Stevenson told me. America’s original sin predates the atrocities that prompted those memorials, but he believes it’s not too late for the country to come to terms with the violence that has supported white supremacy across centuries. “I think we do need truth and reconciliation in America,” he said. “But truth and reconciliation are sequential. You can’t get to reconciliation until you first tell the truth.”
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