My wife and I recently traveled to the South, primarily to visit the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, located in Montgomery, Alabama.
Opened in April 2018 and built by the Equal Justice Initiative under the leadership of Bryan Stevenson, this stunning and sobering memorial is the first in the nation to acknowledge the over 4,000 documented racial terror lynchings of blacks by whites between 1877 and 1950.
Walking through the memorial we discovered one county where over 20 individuals were tortured and lynched in a single day. The walls are covered with the circumstances of many lynchings, such as “After Calvin Mike voted in Calhoun County, Georgia, in 1884, a white mob attacked and burned his home, lynching his elderly mother and his two young daughters.”
When you consider how Germany has confronted its past (you can hardly walk more than a block in Berlin without encountering some marker or memorial to Holocaust victims), it’s clear how little we have done in the United States to confront our racial history.
I agree with Mr. Stevenson that until we confront our past openly and honestly, we’ll never achieve racial harmony in this country.
This museum-memorial brilliantly reveals part of what we must acknowledge and address, but it can only do so if you visit.
Those who visit will viscerally learn more in one day about our racial history than could ever be learned through years of lectures and books.
Mark Love
Falmouth
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