The image derives from a 1960s picture by the South African photographer Ernest Cole of miners being subjected to a humiliating group medical examination. [19] Lee Sentell of the Alabama Department of Tourism acknowledged that the National Memorial offers a different and painful encounter: "Most museums are somewhat objective and benign...This one is not. EJI will also collaborate to place a monument—identical to the monument found at the National Memorial—in the community. And you can also see the state Capitol where Martin Luther King, Jr., led a demonstration and today’s courthouses. Oprah Winfrey: --that are smiling into the camera? Founded by the non-profit Equal Justice Initiative, it opened in downtown Montgomery, Alabama on April 26, 2018. Bryan Stevenson: I think this looks great. So we included personal details about each victim on each monument. It keeps its primary focus on detailing the valiant — and in this telling, triumphant — movement of resistance to racism of the 1950s and ’60s. Approaching the memorial center, directly below the monuments, tall vertical steel strips present over a hundred horrific stories of racial terror and massacres such as “Jesse Thornton was lynched in Luverne, Alabama, in 1940 for addressing a white police officer without the title ‘mister.’” Near the center of the memorial, a water-wall with the dimensional letters recognizes the unknown victims of lynching. A custom stencil version was commissioned to enable consistent and clear presentation of text across multiple scales and to adapt to material production. An interactive installation of death row inmates inside the Equal Justice Initiative’s Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration. Because there is not really a shared understanding of the history of lynching in this country, we conducted a research project that took over six years, in which we attempted to document every lynching that occurred first in Alabama, then the Deep South, the South, and the rest of the country. We started thinking about other countries that have had to overcome violence and how meaningful spaces of remembering have been for healing and overcoming that violence. And the only way people who were white could maintain their political control was to intimidate black people. Photographs were rarely published anywhere. Lacy Mitchell was lynched in Thomasville, Georgia, in 1930 for testifying against a white man accused of raping a black woman. "...no two monuments look the same…just as there is not one shade of black people in America.". A sculpture by Hank Willis Thomas, “Raise Up,” on the grounds of the Memorial for Peace and Justice. They continue to find more. “We think of our legal work as so much more than case law, because courts do not exist in isolation from our environment. I don't even think that white people in our country are free. By the end, we had over 4,000 cases between 1877 and 1950, with stories behind each case. The National Memorial for Peace and Justice opened to the public in April 2018. What role does sculpture play at the memorial? Lynchings in the American South were not isolated hate crimes committed by rogue vigilantes. But ten years ago he turned the attention of his organization to also investigating crimes of the past: the lynchings of African-Americans. Lynching was intended to demonstrate that any black person, male or female, adult or child, could be accused of any offense and be ritually slaughtered. A 1989 Civil Rights Memorial by Maya Lin in downtown Montgomery offers visitors exhortative words and soothing water. It's a legal advocacy group, based in Montgomery, Alabama, focused on defending the poor and  powerless. The Memorial for Peace and Justice does so visually, through its design. This is aggressive, political. Most of the great commemorative works of the past several decades have a similar pedigree, from Maya Lin’s 1982 Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., to Peter Eisenman’s 2005 Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin. It's a shocking and disturbing reality that lynchings were not isolated murders committed only by men in white hoods in the middle of the night. Oprah Winfrey: You actually think that slavery and lynchings led to African-Americans being disproportionately represented in the criminal justice system? To do this, a design program was required that could relentlessly memorialize more than 4,400 known and unknown victims of racial terror lynchings, and also call out the many states and counties in the United States where these violent acts took place. Produced by Denise Schrier Cetta. This report was originally published on April 8, 2018. Upon entering, a series of five dark grey steel signs with white routed letters are affixed to the wall facing the memorial, establishing the context and forcing a confrontation with history. By Antonia Blumberg A memorial honoring thousands of black people who were lynched in the United States in the decades following the Civil War opened on Thursday in Montgomery, Alabama. The scope of this project was to design a visual identity, naming, content strategy, and environmental graphic design program for the memorial, including architectural, interpretive, informational, and wayfinding signs. That it wasn't enough to kill people. Duplicates of each suspended monument are located in a field outside the primary structure, encouraging counties and states to engage in a process of acknowledgment and reconciliation by claiming their monument and placing it as a marker in their own community. In contrast, the National Memorial of Peace and Justice is meant to perturb, not console. Rashad Robinson gives this week’s #BlackResponse to COVID-19. [5] This exhibit expresses the vast effects of slavery, lynchings, and black oppression across state lines. One of its displays is a collection of soil from lynching sites across the United States. And then even, after that, there are cases where the body was dragged to the heart of the black community. Fire is set under him. Nicholas Johnson is Princeton's first Black Valedictorian. The design project and process as described by Small Stuff: The overall vision and strategic design for the memorial was conceived and developed by the client and architects. So far, Stevenson's team has chronicled more than 4,300 lynchings. Jesse Thornton was lynched in Luverne, Alabama, in 1940 for addressing a white police officer without the title “mister.”. The standing monuments look like ranks of closed steel doors or staggered headstones, blocking movement. [15] Laid in rows on the ground are steel columns corresponding to those hanging in the Memorial. The introductory grouping is so tight as to feel imprisoning. EJI then leads visitors on a journey from slavery, through lynching and racial terror, with text, narrative, and monuments to the lynching victims in America. A mob dragged Jesse Washington, a teenager who was convicted of murder after a one-hour trial, from the courtroom to the public square. [20], The opening celebrations, in May 2018, attracted thousands of people to Montgomery,[20] perhaps as many as 10,000. That silence has been decisively broken with the opening of the memorial and the museum.