The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, Montgomery, AL<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nAnd 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\u2019t think many people would have tried such a thing, anyway: A feeling of reverence permeated the atmosphere. This was holy ground.<\/p>\n
As you\u2019ve 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\u2019s a slab for every state in the U.S.\u2014broken down by counties\u2014with 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 hanging bodies. On the outer walls, signs give the sad details of many lynchings: People who were murdered for \u201cknocking on the door of a white woman;\u201d \u201cmaking a white woman feel frightened;\u201d \u201cnot showing respect for a white man.\u201d<\/p>\n
Since the memorial opened in 2018, people have come forward with more stories of lynchings in their families\u2019 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. \u201cIt was in Ferguson, Missouri,\u201d he said. \u201cIn 2018.\u201d<\/p>\n
He told me that a young man had been lynched in Ferguson, but that police were calling it a suicide, \u201clike they always do.\u201d \u201cBut, you know,\u201d he added, \u201cPeople don\u2019t commit suicide with their hands tied behind their back.\u201d\u00a0 [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\u2014in the long history of lynchings so dramatically depicted at the memorial\u2014of an official cover-up?]<\/p>\n
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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m not religious, and I\u2019m 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 \u201cterrorism\u201d to describe lynchings\u2014as 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.<\/p>\n
Watch this video to get a glimpse of the Legacy Museum and the reasons behind it:<\/p>\n