National Memorial for Peace and Justice opens in Alabama
Story Location:
417 Caroline Street
Montgomery, AL 36104
United States
The best way to describe The National Memorial for Peace and Justice is to use the Equal Justice Initiative’s own words. From EJI’s memorial website, “The National Memorial for Peace and Justice is the nation’s first memorial dedicated to the legacy of enslaved black people, people terrorized by lynching, African Americans humiliated by racial segregation and Jim Crow, and people of color burdened with contemporary presumptions of guilt and police violence.”
According to the website, the memorial was conceived with the hope of creating a sober, meaningful site where people can gather and reflect on America’s history of racial inequality. Work on the memorial began in 2010 when EJI staff started investigating thousands of racial terror lynchings in the American South, many of which had never been documented. According to EJI, 6 million black people fled the South as refugees and exiles as a result of what they have named racial terror lynchings.
The 6-acre memorial sits on a hill overlooking Montgomery. At the center of the memorial, at the top of the hill, is a square with 800 monuments, each 6-feet tall, symbolizing the thousands of racial terror lynching victims in the United States. The monuments include victim names, and the counties and states where the lynchings took place. At eye level to begin with, a walkway slowly descends, leaving the monuments towering above as visitors make their way around the square. In the park surrounding the memorial is a field of identical monuments, waiting to be claimed and installed in the counties they represent.
“Over time, the national memorial will serve as a report on which parts of the country have confronted the truth of this terror and which have not,” EJI’s website states.
EJI partnered with artists Kwame Akoto-Bamfo, Dane King and Hank Willis Thomas to create sculptures in the park around the square. The memorial displays writing from novelist Toni Morrison, quotes from the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and a reflection space in the name of Civil Rights journalist Ida B. Wells.
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