America@250: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror at the National Peace and Justice Memorial
- Gina Greenlee, Author
- Jul 26
- 9 min read
Updated: Jul 27
On a hilltop overlooking Montgomery is the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. It is the first public reflection space to acknowledge the history of racial terror lynchings in America; the nation’s first comprehensive memorial dedicated to the legacy of Black Americans who were enslaved, terrorized by lynching, humiliated by racial segregation, and presumed guilty and dangerous.
More than 4,400 Black people killed in racial terror lynchings between 1877 and 1950 are remembered here. Their names are engraved on more than 800 Corten steel monuments – one for each county where a racial terror lynching took place –that form the main structure of the memorial at the heart of this six-acre site.
Journalist Al Letson at Mother Jones interviewed Bryan Stevenson about the National Memorial for Peace and Justice dedicated to the history of lynching. I’ve excerpted part of the interview in this blog post.
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Al: Before I came to The National Memorial for Peace and Justice for the first time I thought I understood how many lynchings had happened in America. Then I came here and was overwhelmed by the number of people who have been lynched in this country.
As soon as you get to the memorial, you’re confronted with how many people we’re talking about, and then you walk through it and experience it. It’s a life-changing moment. How did you think about the design of this memorial to bring people into this history?
Bryan: I went to Berlin to see the Holocaust memorial. It’s powerful. Concrete rectangular slabs sit in the center of the city.
You enter them and they become dense. There’s no narrative about the Holocaust. They trust people to come to Berlin with an understanding of that history so they can step into that memorial and be impacted by it.
I knew we could not do that with regard to the history of Lynching. We had to create a space that took people on a journey.
I wanted people to walk briefly through the history of slavery because without enslavement we wouldn’t have had a hundred years of mob violence directed at Black people. And so, we give them that narrative.
The first thing you see when you come to the memorial is this sculpture by Kwame Akoto-Bamfo, of enslaved people in chains. What was important to me about it is that it depicts the brutality of slavery but also depicts the humanity of the enslaved. There’s a mother holding her child while she’s reaching for the man in front of her.
The memorial square was important because I wanted something that represented people. Most people in this country can’t name a single Black person who was lynched between 1877 and 1950. Just say, “Name one.” They can’t do it. That’s how little we’ve talked about this history. So, for that first corridor, I wanted people to see the names, see their lives and to see the dates.
Our legal system is organized by counties. Our criminal justice system and our public safety system are organized by counties. That was the reason we organized the memorial county by county. Some counties have dozens of lynchings; some counties have two or three.
The memorial houses 800 steel blocks, each six feet tall, suspended from above, and arranged in a square surrounding a grassy courtyard. There’s a monument for each county where racial killings occurred. They resemble elongated gravestones, etched with the names of victims.
As you walk through the memorial, the orientation of the hanging monuments changes from eye level to overhead, evoking the way many lynching victims were hanged, often in public spaces.
And then you are standing underneath these six-foot, Corten steel monuments that identify all of the people lynched whose names you see in the first part of the memorial, and it unnerves a lot of people.
They lifted these bodies up as a statement to the entire African-American community. They wanted to lift up this violence, this terror, this tragedy for others to see. We’ve elevated the monuments because the truth is, lynching in America could have been done in darkness.
It could have been done where the bodies were immediately buried under the ground where you didn’t see much evidence of it. But their intention wasn’t just to kill people. Their intention was to terrorize Black people, to torment, to taunt, to force Black people to commit to and submit to racial hierarchy and Jim Crow.
And so these bodies would be left hanging from trees and hanging from telephone poles and hanging from high structure, sometimes for days. The family would come and try to cut the body down and they wouldn’t let them. They would then take bodies sometimes through Black neighborhoods and force people out on the steps to witness this brutality.
And that’s why we call it racial terrorism because the intent very much was to terrorize the entire African-American community.
So, we wanted something that gave people some appreciation for how this history of terror-violence and brutality hung over the entire Black community. That’s what we want people to experience when they go through the memorial.
Lynched for Social Transgressions
And then we wanted them to understand what this was about. It was not about law and order. It was not about crime. They were lynched for social transgressions. They were lynched for not calling a White person “sir” or not getting off the sidewalk when White people pass. Going to the front of the door instead of the back of the door. They were lynched for asserting their human rights and their dignity.
Six million Black people fled the American South during the first half of the 20th century. We have a wealth gap in America today. Rooted in this forced exodus of millions of Black people, some of whom left land that they own. So, they couldn’t give wealth to their children and grandchildren because of terror violence. That’s a consequence of lynching.
Mary Turner
Mary Turner, eight months pregnant, was lynched because she complained about her husband’s lynching and the mob came to her house and lynched her, mutilated her body.
So, we have in the third quarter [of the memorial] those [individual] narratives because we think it’s important for people to understand that this is not about public safety. This is not about law and order. This is about terrorizing people. And so [these ideas] are particularly important in terms of how we conceptualized [the memorial’s architecture].
We document over 4,000 lynchings at the memorial but there are thousands more that we can’t document. And that’s why the water wall is there to remind people; there are thousands more people who have been lynched than we’ll ever be able to detail.
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I often argue that the north won the civil war, but the south won the narrative war because those ideas of racial hierarchy of white supremacy continued after the civil war and that’s what creates this century of terror violence. Bryan Stevenson, Founder and Executive Director, Equal Justice Initiative
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Al: I’m curious how you see modern-day tragedies fitting into lynching. I’m thinking specifically about George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery. Will their names go into the memorial? How do you weigh that out?
Bryan: For me, the great evil of slavery in America wasn’t the forced labor, wasn’t the brutality, wasn’t the violence. All of those things were horrific.
I think the greatest evil of slavery in this country was the narrative we created to justify enslavement because people who enslaved other people didn’t want to think of themselves as immoral or indecent or unchristian. And how do you think of yourself as moral and decent when you’re pulling a mother away from her screaming children knowing that mother will never see those children again because you’re treating her as property?
Well, you need a narrative.
And in this country, a false narrative was created where it was said that Black people are not as good as White people. Black people are less capable, less worthy, less decent, more dangerous, need more control. And that narrative is what sustained slavery for 246 years. And it’s the reason the civil war ended chattel slavery but did not end the torment and terror that Black people faced.
I often argue that the north won the civil war, but the south won the narrative war because those ideas of racial hierarchy of white supremacy continued after the civil war and that’s what creates this century of terror violence.
So, if somebody’s being lynched because they didn’t say the word ‘sir,’ that’s a narrative that says you have to challenge anybody who asserts this. And that continues throughout the first half of the 20th century.
Then we get into the civil rights era where people begin to tear down the legal architecture of Jim Crow and segregation. And we made progress. I’m a product of that progress. But that narrative still continued.
And that’s what I see as connecting the murder of George Floyd, the murder of Ahmaud Arbery, the murder of Breonna Taylor and so many other people to this history. [However], you don’t have to be killed to be the victim of a presumption of dangerousness and guilt by a police officer.
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The Presumption Of Dangerousness And Guilt
So, if we just focus on the killing without focusing on the presumption of dangerousness and guilt that still gets assigned to Black and Brown people in this country because of this history, we’re not going to get where we need to go.
I’ve had police pull me out of my car, point guns at me, and threaten to blow my brains out. That shouldn’t happen any more than what happened to Ahmaud Arbery.
Which is why in this contemporary moment I want to call that a consequence of this narrative struggle that we have yet to win.
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I gave commencement addresses a few weeks ago and it always breaks my heart to go to these colleges and universities and look out over these beautiful graduates and have to say even if you’re at the top of your class even if you’re going to be a lawyer, even if you’re going to be a doctor, even if you’re going to be a journalist, even if you’re kind, even if you’re loving, if you’re Black or Brown, you will go places in this country where you’re going to have to navigate a presumption of dangerousness and guilt.
And because I’m getting older, I can tell you that when you have to constantly navigate a presumption of dangerousness and guilt, when the burden is on you when you’re stopped by the police to have to make sure you come out of that safely, when you have to keep confronting presumptions of incompetence because of your color, it’s exhausting.
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“…I don’t talk about slavery and lynching and segregation because I want to punish America. I want to liberate us. I genuinely think there’s something better waiting for us. Something that feels more like freedom, more like equality, more like justice, and it’s waiting for us. But the way we get there can’t be through denial about harm.” Bryan Stevenson, Founder and Executive Director, Equal Justice Initiative
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“If we just focus on the killing without focusing on the presumption of dangerousness and guilt that still gets assigned to Black and Brown people in this country because of this history, we’re not going to get where we need to go.” Bryan Stevenson, Founder and Executive Director, Equal Justice Initiative
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“The thing that we haven’t appreciated about the legacy of slavery is how impactful it was, how unhealthy it was for the entire nation. And it doesn’t matter if you were in Mississippi or Delaware or Minnesota or California; enslaving 10 million Black people for 246 years did something horrific and unhealthy to the American experience. And because we never confronted it, and we never talked about it, that legacy manifests itself everywhere.” Bryan Stevenson, Founder and Executive Director, Equal Justice Initiative
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The Legacy Sites offer a powerful,
immersive journey through
America’s history of racial injustice.
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Begin to recover and heal from
racial terror by vowing to never repeat it.
