The National Memorial for Peace and Justice made me cry. And that, I’m sure, is not a unique experience. I can’t speak for the busloads of other people who were there, and I can’t pretend to know how black people feel when they see this stunning, symbolic representation of the thousands of lynchings in America’s sordid racial history. I can only say that, for me, it evoked deep sorrow and outrage at the cruelty that human beings are capable of inflicting upon others.
As a fitting prelude to visiting what has come to be known as the “lynching memorial,” we went to the Legacy Museum, about a mile away in Montgomery, Alabama. Housed in a building that was once part of the domestic slave trading hub in Montgomery, the Legacy Museum sets the stage for the Memorial by poignantly telling the story of slavery and racial injustice in America through news photographs, headlines, archival film, animated and live video documentaries, and even an early 20th century recording in which a 100-year-old former slave describes his experience.
Walking through the exhibits is a gut-wrenching, sensory-overloading experience—almost too much to take in at a single visit.
To convey the scope of slavery in America, a video info-graphic at the Legacy Museum demonstrates how the domestic slave trade evolved after the U.S. government banned the African slave trade in 1808. Limited to slaves already in the country, traders shifted masses of enslaved people from the upper Confederacy to the Deep South, until there were more than a million slaves concentrated just in Alabama, with hundreds of thousands more trapped in other states. In another area of the museum, archival 19th century photos show the scarred backs of beaten slaves and blurry images of families on the slave auction block. On one wall of the museum, enlarged reproductions of advertisements published in newspapers tout the high quality of shipments of slaves scheduled for upcoming auctions.
Of course, the end of slavery did not end racial injustice in America. It merely shifted to other incarnations, such as share-cropping, and to laws institutionalizing white supremacy. One exhibit displays replicas of signs carried by segregationists, and notifications warning “undesirable” groups to stay out of restaurants and bathrooms. In one section, you can sit down at a simulated prison visitor’s booth, pick up a telephone, and listen to a prisoner describe his/her experiences. Many of the people visiting alongside us appeared old enough to remember the fire hoses turned on civil rights marchers, the police dogs attacking, the burning of Freedom Rider buses, and the murder of three civil rights workers in Mississippi. I overhead snippets of conversations among visitors testifying to what they had seen and experienced themselves. But I wonder how younger adults—and especially young children—experience these exhibits.
Walking through the museum, I felt worse and worse about the human race, and sadder and sadder for black people who have been regarded as lesser beings, treated violently, arbitrarily and unfairly—with nowhere to turn for help in so many cases. Their insecurity, fear and physical pain are unimaginable to a privileged person like me.
And then we went to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. As we entered, busload after busload of other visitors arrived, too. Once inside the perimeter, there was almost total silence. Photos are not permitted, so there were no silly selfies, but I don’t think many people would have tried such a thing, anyway: A feeling of reverence permeated the atmosphere. This was holy ground.
As you’ve probably read, the Memorial consists of a series of steel slabs, suspended from the roof, each representing a county in America where law-enforcement officials, huge mobs and small vigilante groups carried out lynchings. There’s a slab for every state in the U.S.—broken down by counties—with the named of lynching victims etched into the hollow steel rectangles. The memorial begins on level ground, and then you descend into what ends up feeling like a forest of hang