Though it may go against our baser instincts, it is a fact that many things can be true at once. On one hand, the United States is surely a country of promise and hope—a place where luck, hard work, and determination are sometimes enough to bring success to even the most marginalized person. But it is also a land steeped in injustice and inequality—where past wrongdoings and the collective silence and ignorance about them allow us to have a false and incomplete view of history and the present.
If we as Americans, and those who live here, are ever going to truly understand this country, we must bear witness to and atone for the past. That is the intent behind the new National Memorial for Peace and Justice that opens on Thursday. Located in Montgomery, Alabama, it contains a legacy museum and memorial to the black victims of lynchings and racial terror in the United States.
As The New York Times aptly describes, there is nothing like it in the United States. And this is a very transformative and powerful thing.
“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.” [...]
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.
A museum and memorial, on their own, aren’t enough to help America do the work of addressing its original sin of white supremacy—which is responsible for racial terror directed not just at blacks, but at the country’s indigenous population and many other racial and ethnic minority groups. But they offer a chance for bearing witness to the specific history of black people in this country and its impact on the present. They are intended to begin a dialogue so that we can acknowledge the trauma and brutality of enslavement, racial terror lynchings, and mass incarceration. They are meant to be sites for collective grief so that we can begin to heal wounds that are centuries deep. This is important for the descendants of lynching victims and black people in general, but it’s equally important for whites.
According to Stevenson, the United States is the most punitive country on the planet. Evidence of that can be seen in our mass incarceration rates which are the highest in the world. Thus, he says that it is a fear of punishment that stops us from apologizing and reckoning with our terrible past.
As he says in his interview with The New York Times:
People do not want to admit wrongdoing in America, Mr. Stevenson said, because they expect only punishment.
“I’m not interested in talking about America’s history because I want to punish America,” Mr. Stevenson continued. “I want to liberate America. And I think it’s important for us to do this as an organization that has created an identity that is as disassociated from punishment as possible.”
The Washington Post explains in detail what visitors can expect upon entering the memorial. It starts with the story of enslaved Africans because, as Stevenson notes, it is the beginning of the narrative of black people in America. Many Americans acknowledge the brutality of the Transatlantic Slave Trade and the kidnapping and forced migration of millions of Africans. But they stop short of fully understanding how it set the foundation for racial discrimination and terror for generations to come. The memorial attempts to make the connection for those who step foot into its hallways.
As DeNeen L. Brown writes:
[According to Stevenson] Without slavery, “it wouldn’t be possible for white families to gather their children and go downtown to the courthouse square and watch a black person be burned to death, to watch a black person be hanged, to watch a black person be tortured.” [..]
The steel monuments, organized by county, appear like gravestones at eye level. Then they begin to rise, until they are dangling overhead like vertical steel coffins.
“Lifting up those monuments was really important because the people who carried out lynchings could have murdered people and buried the bodies in the ground, they could have hidden the evidence,” Stevenson said. “But they didn’t want to do that. They wanted to lift it up to raise it over the entire community so every black person would be menaced and traumatized and terrorized.”
One last and critical part of the memorial is that there is a wall which memorializes the undocumented victims of lynching. In total, over 4,000 victims were identified by those who worked with the Equal Justice Initiative to open the site—though there are arguably many, many more.
The memorial and museum draws their inspiration from the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin and the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg. Though there is great reticence, and a willful ignorance, that exists in the United States about addressing this history, sites of memory like the aforementioned offer us the opportunity to understand who we are, what really happened, and allow us to work toward a better future. It is possible for America to do better and begin a path toward racial reconciliation and justice, but not if we insist on making all of our ancestors into heroes in a past that omits the painful truth.
In a recent podcast interview with Jonathan Capehart, Bryan Stevenson said the following:
“When we own up to our history of violence and abuse and tyranny and enslavement...when we do that, then the opportunity for redemption… that’s how you get to recovery. That’s how you get to restoration, that’s how you get to reconciliation. It begins with telling the truth. [...]
In this country, we’ve developed a really bad habit of never saying I’m sorry. And it leaves us incomplete as a nation because apology isn’t just something you are forced to do when you’ve made a mistake. Apology is how you grow strong, how you become more human.”
Let us hope that the National Memorial for Peace and Justice becomes one part of of America’s process of truth telling, apology and reconciliation for our brutal and terrible past.
To learn more about The Legacy Museum and The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, click here.