On Thursday, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice opened in Montgomery, Alabama, a monument to victims of white supremacy in the United States. The memorial’s centerpiece is a walkway with 800 weathered steel pillars overhead, each of them naming a U.S. county and the people who were lynched there by white mobs.
In addition to the memorial dedicated to the victims of lynching, its partner site, the Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration, also opened Thursday. The museum is located on the site of a former warehouse where enslaved black people were imprisoned. It’s midway between a historic slave market and the dock and train station where tens of thousands of enslaved people were trafficked during the height of the domestic slave trade.
The museum and National Memorial for Peace and Justice are the culmination of years of exhaustive research and interviews with local historians and descendants of lynching victims, conducted by the Equal Justice Initiative, led by its director, Bryan Stevenson. In 2017, the Equal Justice Initiative issued the third edition of its “Lynching in America” report, which found that white Southerners lynched nearly 4,400 black men, women and children between 1877 and 1950. Nearly 800 of those lynchings were previously unaccounted for. The report details a 1916 attack in which a mob lynched Jeff Brown for accidentally bumping into a white girl as he ran to catch a train. In 1940, a crowd lynched Jesse Thornton for not addressing a white police officer as “mister.” In many cases, the lynchings were attended by the entire white communities in an area.
Bryan Stevenson talking:
I’m a product of Brown v. Board of Education. I grew up in a community where black children couldn’t go to the public schools. There were actually no high schools for black kids when my dad was a teenager. And so, when lawyers came into our community and made them open up the public schools, it planted a seed in my mind that the law can be a powerful tool for protecting disfavored people, marginalized communities. And I’ve kind of lived by that. I went to law school. I’ve been practicing law for over 30 years. And I’m still persuaded that the rule of law is critical to our capacity to create justice for those who are disempowered.
But I’ve come to understand recently that even the law will be [in]sufficient if we don’t change the narrative, if we don’t create a deeper commitment to equality. And I think even our courts have been compromised by this narrative of racial difference that we have in America, this history of racial inequality that has made us tolerant of bigotry and discrimination.
So, about 10 years ago, we began working on a project to change the narrative. We started doing this research on slavery, on lynching, on segregation. We put out these reports. We started putting up public markers, because this region is a region where the landscape is littered with the iconography of the Confederacy.
People often say to me, “Why do you want to dig up the past? Why do you want to start talking about the past?” We are preoccupied with the past in the American South. Last Monday was Confederate Memorial Day. It’s a state holiday. We have a state holiday of Jefferson Davis’s birthday. We don’t have Martin Luther King Day in Alabama. We have Martin Luther King/Robert E. Lee Day. And this preoccupation with mid-19th century history is one of the characteristics that oppresses and burdens people of color. We talk about the mid-19th century, but we never talk about slavery. So, for me, talking about slavery, talking about lynching, talking about segregation, talking about our history of racial inequality is critical to creating a consciousness that will allow us to move forward toward a just—toward justice and equality. And I don’t think we’ve done a very good job of that in our country.
I do think that the great evil of American slavery was this narrative of racial difference. I mean, we have to understand that our nation has a very unhealthy narrative of racial difference, that began at the very first moment when Europeans came to this continent. I mean, there were millions of Native people here. We are a post-genocide society, because what I think we did to Native people was genocide. We killed them by the millions. We slaughtered them through famine and war and disease. We didn’t own up to that, because we said those Native people are different racially.
And that narrative of racial difference is part of the reason why slavery flourished for so long. I really do believe the great evil of American slavery was this ideology of white supremacy, this myth we made up that black people aren’t the same, they’re not as evolved, they’re not fully human, they’re three-fifths human. And that consciousness, that bigotry, that ideology, was, for me, the true evil of American slavery.
And in 1865, when the Civil War was over and we passed the 13th Amendment, we committed to ending involuntary servitude and forced labor, but we didn’t say anything about this narrative of racial difference, this ideology of white supremacy. And because of that, I don’t think slavery ended in 1865. I think it just evolved.
It turned into decades of terrorism. And what happened to African Americans between Reconstruction and World War II was racial terror. Black people were being pulled out of their homes, they were drowned, they were beaten, they were hanged, they were brutalized—sometimes on the courthouse lawn in front of thousands of white people who cheered and celebrated this ritualistic violence.
And it had a powerful impact on communities of color. In fact, sometimes older people of color come up to me, and they say, “Mr. Stevenson, I get angry when I hear somebody on TV talking about how we’re dealing with domestic terrorism for the first time in our nation’s history after 9/11.” They say, “We grew up with terror. We had to worry about being bombed and lynched and menaced every day of our lives.” And 6 million people fled, black people fled, the American South during the 20th century. And the black people in Cleveland, in Chicago, in Detroit, in Los Angeles, in Oakland didn’t go to those communities as immigrants; they went to those communities as refugees and exiles from terror. And we haven’t talked about this history, this legacy.
So, in our memorial in Montgomery that opened last week, when you walk into the space, the first sculpture you see is a slavery sculpture. It’s people enchained. It was made by West African artist Kwame Akoto-Bamfo. He calls it Nkyinkim, which is an African word for resistance and resiliency in the face of oppression.
But it’s important for people to understand that without slavery, without the legacy of slavery, without this ideology of white supremacy, black women and men would not have been lynched for bumping into a white person, for walking behind a white woman, for knocking on the front door, for all of these social transgressions. It would not have happened.
And I also think that this era is important for understanding how we got to where we are now. When you come out of our memorial that honors these 4,000 victims of racial terror lynchings, we have another sculpture, created by Dana King. It’s called Guided by Justice. It’s three women walking during the Montgomery bus boycott. And one of the points we’re trying to make is that we have not fully appreciated the courage of people like Claudette Colvin, Mary Louise Smith, Rosa Parks in resisting segregation. They could have lost their lives. And that courage has to be understood.
And then, of course, the fourth sculpture is by Hank Willis Thomas, and it’s a collection of men with their arms raised up, which speaks to this present moment, where this ideology of white supremacy, this narrative of racial difference, persists. And today we still live in a country where black and brown people are frequently presumed dangers and guilty just because of their color. And whether they’re sitting in a Starbucks or they’re in a courtroom or they’re confronting a police officer, that burden still exists. And we’re not going to lift that burden until we tell this history, this story, and motivate people to deal with this issue much more directly.
I think that we just haven’t done a very good job of creating a consciousness about this history. You know, when I go to South Africa, when I go to the Apartheid Museum, I see a place that is a very powerful institution designed to make sure no one ever forgets the hardship of apartheid. The suffering of black Africans by that white minority is documented and detailed. They make it impossible for people to forget or to distort that history. In Rwanda, the Genocide Museum there is a powerful cultural institution. They actually have human skulls in that space. That’s how desperately the survivors and victims of that horror want to express their grief. When I go to Berlin, Germany, I see markers and stones every hundred meters outside the homes of Jewish families, Roma families, that were abducted during the Holocaust. Germans want you to go to the Holocaust Memorial, and they want to change the narrative. They don’t want to be thought of as Nazis and fascists for the rest of their lives.
But in this country, we don’t talk about slavery. We don’t talk about lynching. We don’t talk about the horrors of this history of racial inequality. Many of the people who were with us last week came up to me and said, “You know, I just realized I’ve never seen a sculpture about slavery before in my life.” They’ve never really been in a place where they were confronted with the legacy of lynching in a way that was tangible and visible. And I think that implicates our ability to move forward, to create real equality.
And so, yes, it is important that we create a new landscape, that we erect symbols and statues and monuments and markers that push our nation in a different direction, rather than protecting these false narratives that I think we have built to reinforce that same ideology of white supremacy. And I think our artists, our sculptors, our writers, our musicians have a critical role to play in what I see as essentially narrative work.
I don’t think we’ve ever felt the kind of shame we should feel about what we did to Native Americans, about what we did during slavery, about what we did during lynching, what we did during segregation. And I don’t think of shame as a bad thing for us to experience. When you do something shameful, there has to be some moment of remorse and regret and repentance and truth telling. That’s what leads to redemption and recovery and repair and restoration. I represent people who do bad things. None of them expects to be paroled if they’re not willing to admit the wrongfulness of their crime.
And a lot of times when people hear me talking about this, I think they get a little edgy, because we’ve become such a punitive society, Amy. I think, you know, we have highest rate of incarceration in the world. We’re so punitive in America that we’re unwilling sometimes to admit our mistakes, to acknowledge our wrongdoings, because we fear punishment. And for me, what’s been important about this project is to make clear to people, I’m not interested in talking about our history because I want to punish America; I think talking about our history is the way we liberate America, the way we move to a different place, we get to some place where we acknowledge the pain of this path so we can recover. I do believe that our country needs truth and repair, truth and reconciliation. But I believe those things are sequential. You can’t get the repair, you can’t get the conciliation, until you first tell the truth.
– Last week, the editorial board of the local paper, the Montgomery Advertiser, published a public apology for its previous coverage of lynching, on the same day as the monument and museum opened. The Montgomery Advertiser was among many white-owned newspapers across the United States that failed to investigate—and at times even celebrated—the white mob violence that killed thousands of African Americans throughout U.S. history. Instead, it was black journalists, mostly notably Ida B. Wells, who exposed the horrors of lynching to the world, and paid a heavy price for that.
White media, white journalists, white newspapers were complicit. They were aiders and abettors in much of this violence. They sometimes advertised where these lynchings would take place. And so, to acknowledge that, to repent for that, to commit to not do that again, is the very heart, what I think our nation needs to do in response to this legacy and this history. So I’m encouraged by that. I hope other newspapers across the region do the same thing.
Part 2
we’ve been working really hard on this. When you walk through the front doors of our museum, the first thing you see is a sign that says, “Montgomery, a city shaped by slavery.” And what we really want to do is to kind of retell the history of our community. Montgomery was the cradle of the Confederacy. It was at the heart of this effort to preserve slavery forever. And we haven’t really talked about that. And you see that sign.
You see a big sign that says, “You are standing in a warehouse where formerly enslaved—or, enslaved people were held.” And that authenticity is part of what we’re trying to present, too. And then you walk into a space which replicates the warehouse, the slave pens, where people, black people, would be chained and held pending an auction. And I just don’t think we actually have an optic for slavery that’s very disruptive, that’s very discomforting. We make our pictures of slavery too often benign, and people look happy and comfortable. But in our museum, you see these slave pens. And when you walk close to the pen, what emerges is the ghost of an enslaved person. It’s a hologram. And these performers actually recite words from slave narratives. They’re first-person accounts of enslaved people expressing their grief and anguish, their fear and anxiety about what’s about to come when they get to the slave auction. You hear a woman singing in a slave pen, and she’s singing some of these spirituals that we sometimes hear, but it has a different impact when you see it being sung by—hear it being sung by someone in a pen. So when she says, “Lord, how come me here? I wish I’d never been born,” it just has a different resonance.
And then you walk into the main exhibit, and you’ll see banners that present slave catalogues. And the language, to see a catalogue with the label, “Negroes, mules, carts and wagons,” I think, for me, is really powerful. You’ll see the slave narratives, and you hear enslaved people saying things like, “Slavery—selling is worse than flogging,” one woman says. She said, “My back has been beaten many times but has always healed. They sold my husband away, and my heart is not right yet.” And we really try to tell the story about how 50 percent of enslaved people were separated from their families, their children, their siblings, during the domestic slave trade.
And then you move from slavery into lynching, where we have this wall of jars that are filled with soil collected from various lynching sites that community volunteers went to. And it’s quite, for me, moving to see the names of these victims immortalized in this way and create this image that makes the legacy of lynching tangible.
Then there are the signs of segregation, the “white-only” signs, the “no coloreds,” all of that, which I think we have to remember to appreciate the commitment that these communities made to keep black people oppressed. And it wasn’t just people in Klan robes. It was the legislators and the governors and the elected officials that were saying segregation forever.
And finally, you enter a part of the museum where you see incarcerated men and women. And you go into the visitation booths that millions of people have entered during this era to see their loved ones, and you hear their stories of wrongful conviction, of unfair sentencing, of conditions of confinement. We have letters from our clients. And all of this is designed to kind of show this line that continues from slavery, through lynching, through segregation, to this era today, where black and brown people are often presumed dangerous and guilty.
When we have a consciousness of how frequently we have failed to address racial bias and discrimination, I think it can helpfully—hopefully increase our consciousness now. I mean, the reason why the United States Supreme Court issues the decision it issues in Shelby County, the case where they decided to retreat from the Voting Rights Act, is because they don’t actually understand the weight of this history, the legacy of this history. The reason why the United States Supreme Court, in McCleskey v. Kemp in 1987, talks about the inevitability of bias and discrimination in the administration of the death penalty is because they don’t understand the obligation, the moral obligation, to overcome this history.
Our journalists do this all the time. They minimize bigotry and discrimination. They marginalize stories about racial bias. And I think, to get them to understand why they should not do that, we have to remind them of how they are replicating the failures of journalists generations before them. During the civil rights era, most Southern newspapers were indifferent to the activism of Dr. King or hostile to it. And, you know, I’ve said this before. Everybody wants to think that if they were alive during slavery, they’d be an abolitionist. Everybody wants to think that if they were active during the time of lynching, they’d be rallying against and trying to prevent lynchings. Most of us believe that if we were alive and in a position to march in the 1950s, we’d be on the side of Dr. King. But today, we are in the face of all of these problems. One in three black male babies is expected to go to jail or prison. There are these constant unarmed shootings, shootings of unarmed black people. And the question is: If we’re not prepared to respond to these issues, if we’re not prepared to act today, then I don’t think we can claim that we would have acted any differently during slavery and lynching and segregation.
So, that consciousness, for me, is critical to creating our institutions—not just the press, but our courts, the police, law enforcement, our elected officials—to think differently about this continuing legacy of bias and discrimination that manifests itself all the time. All the time. And that’s the challenge that I see us trying to take on with these cultural projects.
– last month, protesters repeatedly occupied the Philadelphia Starbucks to denounce Starbucks for racial profiling, after a video went viral of police arresting two African-American men for being inside the coffee shop. Their lawyer says the two men were waiting for a third person to arrive for a business meeting, when a Starbucks employee called the police, within minutes, and claimed the men were trespassing. So, the Starbucks CEO, Kevin Johnson, has apologized, calling the incident “reprehensible.” In response to the pressure, Starbucks said it would hold a nationwide racial bias sensitivity training on May 29th that all their employees have to go to. They’re going to close the stores for a number of hours for this.
we’re not going to get people where they need to be during a four-hour training. We’re not going to be able to achieve what must be achieved during that moment. But if we can start this process of committing to recovery and acknowledging how implicit bias and overt bias makes us vulnerable to precisely the tragedy of what happened in that story, I think that’s a positive thing.
I’m actually more impressed that they’re closing the stores, that there will be some economic consequence to this incident, than anything, because I think what we’ve done too often in the past is we’ve tried to minimize these incidents, we’ve tried to explain them away. And I don’t think that’s the right response. We need to say, “You know what? Something terrible happened. This should have never happened. We want to teach all of our employees that this is something that is not acceptable. We want to signal that this is a big deal that this happened.” And those kinds of gestures, I think, are key.
You know, I don’t believe—you know, as somebody who defends people who sometimes commit crimes, I’m still committed to this idea that we’re all more than the worst thing we’ve ever done, that there has to be space for recovery and redemption and restoration. I wouldn’t be able to do what I do for my clients if I didn’t believe that. And so I think there is a way to do better, but we have to understand the nature of the problem.
ADL will not be involved in the curriculum development, and I’m not actually going to be involved in that, either. I’m not—I’m not an expert on training around these issues. My interest is in actually making sure that corporations respond appropriately when they have these kind of issues. There are going to be some great people that are going to be involved in putting together that kind of curriculum. But I don’t think anybody should expect that you can undo 400 years of bigotry and discrimination in a few hours. I don’t think that’s realistic. I don’t think that’s achievable.
I think what we have to commit to is a long-term process. And not just Starbucks employees. If we made every Starbucks in America a safe space for people of color, we would not have achieved anything that we can celebrate, because Starbucks is not the world. The places that we have to work on are our courts and our elected spaces, our schools, where black children are often victimized and suspended and expelled. I mean, I’m very sort of supportive of this effort, but I don’t want to be at all naive about what happens in a Starbucks being the answer to what happens in America. We have a schoolhouse-to-jailhouse pipeline. We have jails and prisons that are filled with folks who are not a threat to public safety. We have black and brown people being menaced and targeted by the police. We have a network of political discussions that always exclude people of color. And until we confront those spaces and challenge those places, we’re not going to be able to achieve the kind of justice that most of us seek. That’s my challenge. That’s my heart.
I guess I’ve always thought of myself as a civil rights lawyer, social justice lawyer. And the death penalty was just the issue that was my priority. I think the death penalty is lynching’s stepson. And because it is so racialized and biased, I felt like I had to address it. But I’ve always thought of myself as a social justice lawyer, and I think of this work as consistent with that challenge, that calling, to do social justice. I’m excited about it because I think it’s the critical next step for us to create institutions that can respond to the legal arguments we make about bias and discrimination. And I hope people do come to our community and to see these sites, to go to these museums and memorials, and experience this history in a meaningful way.
I think this country is in the middle of an identity crisis, the fact that we have tried to romanticize our history. I mean, when I hear the president talking about “make America great again,” I don’t know, as an African American, what decade I’m supposed to want to relive. And I do think we haven’t actually positioned ourselves to understand some of these messages. I think the politics of fear and anger is on the rise, and we’ve got to fight that. That’s what created the “war on drugs.” It’s what allowed us to be indifferent to lynching. It’s what permitted this bigotry to go unchallenged for so long. So I think this is a critical time in America where people committed to justice, people of goodwill, have to understand that we cannot be silent, we cannot be active. We’ve got to get up and do the things that are necessary to create a healthier community.
And we are not getting the kind of leadership that we need to deal with these issues. Whenever we start debating slavery—and this happened after Michelle Obama gave her speech at the Democratic National Convention. You had people arguing, “Was slavery so bad?” When people start trying to legitimate white supremacy and those who are actively committing violent acts against people of color, then it’s the time for us to realize that this is something that we need to address urgently, immediately. And I just think we’ve not been as focused on that as we need to. I think this is a really important moment in American history, where we’re either going to confront this history and understand that we have to overcome it, or we’re going to try to minimize it, sugarcoat it, romanticize it, in the way that I’ve heard the president do, and fall deeper into these patterns and practices that oppress and marginalize and minimize some communities because of their color or their national origin. I mean, this is the same candidacy that talked about banning Muslims and denigrated Mexicans. And I think all of us have to see the threat posed by that, and take seriously the political challenge that awaits us in these coming elections.
_____
Bryan Stevenson
founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, the nonprofit behind the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, the country’s first-ever memorial to the victims of lynching in the United States. He is an attorney who has worked on death penalty cases in the Deep South for decades. He is the author of Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption.
— source democracynow.org