In May of 2018, I was fortunate enough to join a few educators from the University of Georgia and Clarke County School District in a trip to Montgomery, Alabama. While there we visited to amazing sites that I won't forget and hope to visit again soon. The first was the Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice which is what you see pictured above. Both of these sites are operated by an organization known as the Equal Justice Initiative which was founded by Bryan Stevenson in 1989. Many of you heard this name several years ago when a book he wrote entitled Just Mercy was released this book has recently been made into a film of the same name starring actors Jaime Foxx and Michael B. Jordan.
The Equal Justice Initiatives mission is basically what its name says it is
"The Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) is committed to ending mass incarceration and excessive punishment in the United States, to challenging racial and economic injustice, and to protecting basic human rights for the most vulnerable people in American society."
So I definitely encourage you to check out their website to learn about how they go about doing their work. Here I hope to highlight the two aforementioned locations.
Let's start with the Legacy Museum. I took this photo outside of the museum.
I loved this quote and is why I believe I'm a student of history. It is why I believe we should also be students of history to some degree.
So photos were not allowed inside of the museum and call me what you want I adhered to their rules, so I'll use what I can find on Google to showcase the impact and why you need to go.
So as its name tells you it chronicles the history of Blacks from enslavement through to mass incarceration. The museum is actually on the site of an old warehouse where they once held enslaved Blacks before selling them. The museum is extremely interactive and you start your journey through the museum peering into slave cabins and hearing the stories of various slaves. I know many of us have seen the film or read the book 12 Years a Slave , but it's an extremely emotional experience hearing these slaves recount what it felt like being prepared to be sold. Sometimes for the first time. In some cases they were being sold away from their families. (So this thing about the Black family and Black fathers didn't just start. Black families were being separated generations ago and not by their own choosing.)
From the slave pens you're taken in further into the museum where more about slavery is chronicled and what our journey into and through Jim Crow was like. I found it interesting reading some of the various ordinances and laws that states had during the Jim Crow era to keep Blacks and Whites segregated. Many of us know that buses, schools, and water fountains were segregated, but did you know that many cemeteries were segregated as well. (I visited the black section of the Oakland Cemetery in Atlanta on Juneteenth more coming on that later.) When the fair or carnival came to town Blacks would often times get one day out of the whole week. Zoos had Colored Days. Beaches had color lines you couldn't cross (this would cause a race riot in Chicago in 1919). Its interesting to note that the same arguments used decades ago for segregated schools are the same types of arguments you hear today as it relates to school vouchers, etc. And of course we can't forget about the terrible reality that we're currently dealing with, mass incarceration. Its a very holistic view of the Black struggle.
This wall of jars is filled with sand from various lynching locations across the country.
Before I explain why this part moved me the most and why it was my favorite part of the museum let me give you a definition of lynching from our friend Merriam-Webster, "to put to death, especially by hanging, by mob action and without legal authority." While we could argue around whether or not real laws were ever broken to cause someone to by lynched we all have common sense enough to determine that the laws were extremely unfair and at times downright stupid. So as we look at the legality of things lets first look at the law and determine its fairness, its justness. Dr. King taught us to use civil disobedience which was the act of civilly breaking laws so that they might be challenged. Dr. King was not this law abiding citizen that people today like to make him out to be. He got in the way, broke the law, and was jailed for it. But back to this wall of jars.
The EJI has done excellent work investigating thousands of lynchings that happened not only in the South, but across the nation. As a part of this they found relatives of some of those that had been lynched. In some cases these jars were given to those relatives who went back to the area where their ancestor had been lynched and collected dirt. The jars are labeled with date, victims name, and county. It reminded me of the true terror of these acts. That in a way we're still connected to these events through the very dirt where the dead lay. The very trees from which they swung.
Perfect segue into the Memorial for Justice and Peace which was about a 15-20 minute walk away from the museum up on a hill.
View from bottom of the hill.
Extremely poignant quote by the late great author, Toni Morrison.
That's me! 😀
This monument is the first of its kind and magnitude in the United States to honor the memory of those whose lives were wrongly and often illegally taken from them through the act of lynching. There a roughly 20 Holocaust museums in the United States (this is no knock at the seriousness of the Holocaust) an event that didn't occur on American soul. And then you have only one which opened in 2018 dedicated to lynching which runs deep at the roots of American society.
The EJI have undisclosed thousands of lynchings across the United States. The memorial itself documents about 800. Those hanging slabs you see represent a county and on the slab are written the names and dates of lynchings.
There are replicas of those slabs surrounding the monument for better viewing. Here a few from counties I knew that I took while there.
Coffee County, Georgia
Early County, Georgia
In 2015, EJI released an extensive report on the history of lynching in the United States. In their report they listed some of the reasons an individual might have been lynched.
- General Lee, a black man, was lynched by a white mob in 1904 for merely knocking on the door of a white woman's house in Reevesville, South Carolina.
- White men lynched Jeff Brown in 1916 in Cedarbluff, Mississippi, for accidentally bumping into a white girl as he ran to catch a train.
- In 1920, a pair of brothers were lynched for wanting to leave work at a white-owned farm for better treatment. The owner alleged that they had shot at him. They were arrested and taken to the fair grounds were they were tortured and burned in from of crowd of about 3000. Their sisters would jailed for their "protection" but would be beaten and gang-raped by over 30 men while in custody. This all occurred in Paris, Texas.
As you can see by the last incident many of these events were well attended and well advertised in local newspapers. People made an event of it and brought their children. People would collect souvenirs, a scrap of clothing or sometimes a piece of burnt flesh. Pictures would be taken and sent off as postcards.
The history of lynching has not died in America. Many of the deaths that we see on social media and the news of unarmed Black men and women are in themselves modern day lynchings. Unless someone rewrote the Constitution and told me that we no longer had the right to be judged by a jury of our peers then Black men and women should not be dying in the manner that they have been. If they have committed crimes, fine, arrest them without the brutality, place them in jail (give them fair treatment while there), set REASONABLE bail (or get rid of the bail system all together that's an issue for another time), and ensure that they're given their day in court. What also makes the things we see today similar to the lynchings of the past is that many of the perpetrators who were often well known at the time would go to their graves never having been tried for their crimes.
I implore you all to visit these sites if you ever get the chance. Take your families and friends. Take your students and church groups. This history needs to be told in a very huge way. Below you'll find links to EJI's website as well as the report on lynching that I referenced earlier. I hope you leave this post with something. I've also left a link to the Lynching Project: Murder and Memory in Georgia, here some of you mainly my Georgians may be able to find some stories from lynchings that occurred in your hometowns.
Peace, Love, and History,
- Mr. D
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