“We want to tell the truth, because we believe in truth and reconciliation, but we know that truth and reconciliation are sequential. We can’t get where we’re trying to go if we don’t tell the truth first.” Public interest lawyer Bryan Stevenson, the founder and executive director of the Montgomery, Ala.–based Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), said those words in an episode of 60 minutes, hosted by Oprah, that aired earlier this month, while standing with descendants of Wes Johnson at the site in Abbeville, Ala., where the 18-year old tenant farmer was brutally lynched in 1937.
Acknowledging the truth about racial terror in this country is at the heart of two new sites that EJI is inaugurating in Montgomery today: The National Memorial for Peace and Justice and The Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration.
The memorial stems from a research project undertaken by EJI in 2010 to document the racial terror lynchings and the resulting community terror and trauma that occurred in the southern United States. That research has since been extended to the entire country; it and its resulting report, Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror, were accompanied by a project to commemorate the victims and acknowledge the act—traveling to the sites of those lynchings to collect soil and leave markers of the events. The new memorial was in turn designed to provide a national site of remembrance. EJI describes the memorial as being designed with assistance from Boston- and Kigali, Rwanda–based MASS Design Group, and features sculptures by artists including Kwame Akoto-Bamfo, Dana King, and Hank Willis Thomas. It sits on a 6-acre site in Montgomery and features more than 800 Cor-Ten boxes, suspended on metal columns that form a thin roof canopy. Each box represents a county where documented lynchings took place and is inscribed with the names of the victims—more than 4,400 have been documented so far. While visitors approach the boxes at eye-level, a pathway slopes up through the memorial bringing visitors into a cavernous space underneath the suspended markers, with a view that drives home the scale of, and invokes the nature of, the violence. Stories about individual victims line the textured walls.
A 16-minute walk from the memorial, the new 11,000-square-foot Legacy Museum—which EJI describes as being created with design and creative partners including New York–based design firm Local Projects, Tim Lewis and TALA, Molly Crabapple, Orchid Création, Stink Studios, Human Pictures, HBO, and Google—examines the history of racial injustice in America and how it persists to this day. Exhibits in the collection include firsthand accounts of the slave trade, jars of soil collected from sites of lynchings, and audio and video installations examining mass incarceration in modern-day prison systems, featuring the stories of individuals such as Anthony Ray Hinton, who served 28 years on death row in Alabama for two murders he did not commit and was freed with legal assistance from EJI. The museum sits on the site of a former Montgomery warehouse where slaves were held a block away from the site of what was one of the city’s most active slave markets.
The opening of the two new facilities is being marked by a two-day Justice Summit featuring speakers such as Sherrilyn Ifill, the director counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, filmmaker Ava DuVernay, Gloria Steinham, and former Vice President Al Gore. The weekend will also feature a Concert For Peace and Justice, featuring artists such as the Roots, Dave Matthews, Usher, and Common.
