On April 26, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice opened in Montgomery, AL. The memorial is "dedicated to the legacy of enslaved black people, people terrorized by lynching, African Americans humiliated by racial segregation and Jim Crow, and people of color burdened with contemporary presumptions of guilt and police violence." Jamelle Bouie has a must- read essay about what the lynching memorial signifies for the history of the period from the post- Civil War Reconstruction to the mid- 20th Century, as well as the echoes of that history in our politics and culture today. Here's a snippet:
Lynching echoes in other ways. Our politics are in the grip of a backlash defined, in large part, by deep racial entitlement on the part of many white Americans. Indeed, racial violence—or the promise of such—remains a potent tool for defining the boundaries of white racial community. As a candidate for president, Donald Trump promised state action against Hispanic immigrants and Muslim refugees. Not as punishment but as defense—a way to keep America free of people that, in his view, cannot assimilate. How did he describe these groups? As “rapists,” criminals, and drug dealers—dangerous gang members who defile and kill innocent American women. Far from repelling voters, this language primed and activated racial fear and resentment among many white voters, supercharging its electoral potency. Trump wasn’t just defining an enemy, he was speaking a language of racial threat—of purity and morality—that has its roots in the lynching era.The memorial itself is a punch to the smug gut of American "exceptionalism." From the memorial's web site (link above):
Set on a six-acre site, the memorial uses sculpture, art, and design to contextualize racial terror. The site includes a memorial square with 800 six-foot monuments to symbolize thousands of racial terror lynching victims in the United States and the counties and states where this terrorism took place.
The memorial structure on the center of the site is constructed of over 800 corten steel monuments, one for each county in the United States where a racial terror lynching took place. The names of the lynching victims are engraved on the columns...Due to the malignancy in the Oval Office and the Komplizen in his regime and the Republican Party, millions upon millions of his worshipful followers have felt empowered to emerge from under the rocks where fear and resentment have always existed. Of course, racial intimidation in service to a white supremacist hierarchy can be seen today in excessive police violence in minority communities, in voter suppression and racial gerrymandering, and in individual acts of cruelty large and small. This memorial is an opportune reminder of what happens when a vicious racial philosophy is allowed to take hold, and why we can't let that happen again.
