ing bodies. On the outer walls, signs give the sad details of many lynchings: People who were murdered for “knocking on the door of a white woman;” “making a white woman feel frightened;” “not showing respect for a white man.”
Since the memorial opened in 2018, people have come forward with more stories of lynchings in their families’ histories, and more names are being added. When I asked a docent about the most recent lynching in the US, I was shocked at his answer. “It was in Ferguson, Missouri,” he said. “In 2018.”
He told me that a young man had been lynched in Ferguson, but that police were calling it a suicide, “like they always do.” “But, you know,” he added, “People don’t commit suicide with their hands tied behind their back.” [News coverage of the incident does not seem to include the hands-tied-behind-his-back detail, so I am researching the news further, to try to figure out how to interpret what he stated as fact. But, then again, who am I to say? How do I know that this is not another case—in the long history of lynchings so dramatically depicted at the memorial—of an official cover-up?]
The final section of the memorial is a stone wall, inscribed with a remembrance for all victims, over which cascades a gentle but infinite waterfall. I experienced that waterfall as a flood of unending tears shed by the families of people who innocently went out of the house one day and never came back. They were victims of hate that I once thought unimaginable in the apparently fictional America I grew up in — but that I now see, in the current political climate, as frighteningly imaginable. That’s when I sat down and cried. Many of my tears came simply from being in a place commemorating such horrific events. I was thinking about the broken-hearted mothers who lost their sons, and that made me think about the recent death of my own son, from cancer. I would not presume to equate my personal loss to that of generations of black families terrorized by lynching — but I do, in my own way, feel connected to their grief.
I’m not religious, and I’m not sure about the concept of sin. But if there is such a thing, lynching certainly qualifies, as do the perpetuation of racial hatred and the institutionalization of fear. I was heartened to note that several of the inscriptions placed around the memorial use the word “terrorism” to describe lynchings—as they were, in fact, designed to terrorize the black community into submission. I can only hope that the memorial helps people whose history has been stained by the hatred of bigotry to find affirmation of their story, and acknowledgment of their pain. In a normal ending to a post like this, I would probably add “hope for a better future.” But as to that, I am agnostic.
Watch this video to get a glimpse of the Legacy Museum and the reasons behind it: