10/11/20: Montgomery's Lynching Memorial

The unassuming house in Montgomery, Alabama, built around 1912, has been the home for the ministers of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church since 1919. Its most famous inhabitant was the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who lived here from 1954-1960. After becoming the church pastor in September 1954, and President of the Montgomery Improvement Association, he led the Montgomery Bus Boycott which launched his career as a world leader for civil rights and humanitarian causes. When King returned home from a Boycott meeting in January 1956 to find a bomb had damaged the front of the house, he calmed the angry crowd from the porch, thereby averting possible violence. 

The house had been occupied from 1947-1952 by Dr. Vernon Johns, an earlier advocate of civil rights. Nobel Peace Prize winner King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee on April 4, 1968, while trying to secure workers' rights.

Montgomery's National Memorial for Peace and Justice was the nation's first memorial dedicated to the legacy of Black slaves and those terrorized by lynching. The memorial was the result of years of work by the non-profit Equal Justice Initiative or EJI to identify more than 4,000 Blacks who were lynched between 1877 and 1950. 

Martin Luther King, Jr.'s words: "True peace is not merely the absence of tension; it is the presence of justice."

We read that in the 17th and 18th centuries, 12 million Africans were kidnapped, chained, and brought to the Americas to create wealth for Europeans. Two million people died during the horrific voyage across the Atlantic Ocean. For over two centuries, slaves in the US were bartered, sold, abused, exploited, tortured, and confined in involuntary servitude. Enslaved Blacks fueled economic growth in the country where a belief in White supremacy and racial differences was created to justify slavery and made it morally acceptable even though the US Constitution required justice and liberty for all.

Though there were calls to end the international slave trade, the demand in the 19th century still grew for slaves. The forcible taking of land from Indigenous people and a thriving plantation economy was the impetus for the Domestic Slave Trade in which over a million Blacks from the North were trafficked to the South. After President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, more than 90 percent of all Black Americans in the country lived in the Deep South.

Before coming to the memorial, I only knew Africans had been forcibly removed from their homes and sent to the Americas -  nothing, nada, about the domestic slave trade. What a lot I still had to learn about this terrible chapter in my adopted country's history.

The population of slaves in the late 1800s grew dramatically and they suffered brutal abuse and mistreatment. Almost fifty percent of all slaves were separated from their children, spouses, parents, or siblings during the Domestic Slave Trade. After the Southern states were defeated in the bloody Civil War, the 13th Amendment was passed which forbade involuntary servitude and forced labor. However, left intact was a bitter resistance to racial equality and continued support for White supremacy and racial hierarchy which meant that slavery hadn't ended but rather evolved. As many White Americans in the South believed they were inherently superior to Blacks, they reacted violently to the requirement that they treat their former "human property" as their equals and pay for their labor. Just in the first two years following the war, thousands of Blacks were murdered for asserting their freedom and basic rights, sometimes in mobs in cities like Memphis or New Orleans. 

Any attempts in Congress to provide federal protection to formerly enslaved Blacks were undermined by the US Supreme Court which overturned laws that provided solutions to Blacks facing violent persecution. Between 1868 and 1871, thousands of Black Americans were killed in a wave of terror merely for failing to obey a White person. Sadly, Northern politicians in the 1870s failed to hold up their commitment to protect Blacks.

Racial segregation became the law of the land when White Southerners prohibited Blacks from voting and created an economic system of sharecropping and tenant farming which would keep Blacks indentured and poor for generations. Racial terror lynchings were used to enforce racial hierarchy and oppression and to force Blacks to accept abusive mistreatment and subordination. Governments at all levels largely tolerated these terrorist acts of thousands of Americans, many of whose identities and stories will never be known.

Over 4,400 lynchings of Black Americans targeted by groups of two to over 10,000 Whites have been documented between 1877 and 1950. It seems absolutely inconceivable these lynchings by hanging, burning, shooting, stabbing, and beating were conducted on courthouse lawns and their perpetrators behaved with impunity. Some of them were falsely accused of rape or murder and presumed guilty, and killed without trial or investigation. Others were lynched for political activism or economic success, slaughtered in widespread attacks on Black communities, or even killed in place of a friend or relative whom the mob couldn't locate.

Unlike frontier justice in the West, racial terror lynchings normally occurred in communities with courts in place. However, since the courts were considered as "too good" for the Blacks, lynching was sanctioned by law enforcement and elected officials. Victims were tortured for hours before their bodies were left out on display to traumatize other Blacks. People in the mob often documented their atrocities by posing for pictures with a dangling or burned corpse.

Black lynching victims killed between 1877 and 1950 mostly occurred in the 12 Southern states with Mississippi, Louisiana, and Georgia among the deadliest. Though some victims were targeted because of attempts to organize Black communities for political and economic equality, others were lynched for refusing to address a White man as "sir" or demanding to be served at the counter in a restaurant. As White lives and White property held heightened value, the lives of Black people held little or none in the rigid caste system.

Almost a quarter of Black lynching victims were accused of sexual assault and nearly a third were accused of murder. But, since Blacks were presumed guilty and dangerous, charges against Blacks were rarely looked into. Almost all those were lynched without investigations, much less a trial. Because of opposition by Southern elected officials, efforts to pass federal anti-lynching legislation repeatedly failed. Just one percent of lynchings after 1900 led to convictions.

Nearly six million Black Americans fled the South between 1910 and 1970 after receiving no protection from the constant threat of death. Lynching dramatically reshaped the geographic, political, social, and economic conditions of Blacks still today.

The memorial remembered the thousands killed, the generations of Blacks terrorized, and the legacy of suffering and injustice that still haunts us all. Also remembered were the countless victims whose deaths were not recorded in news archives which could not be documented, and who are solely recognized in the memories of those who loved them.

The Memorial's hope was that telling the truth about the era of racial terror and together reflecting on what happened so its legacy could lead to a more thoughtful and informed commitment to justice today.

In the heart of the memorial were over 800 hanging steel monuments, one for each county in the United States where documented racial terror lynchings took place. It was no mistake the panels were the shape and size of coffins.

On the monuments or panels were engraved the state, county, and names of those known or unknown victims in that particular county including the year they were lynched. Reading one panel after another was like a constant punch to the gut. To get just a sense of the horror, I recommend you click on any one or more of the photos to make it bigger and easier to read. 

We would have liked to understand why some panels were 'open' or had nothing underneath while others had what appeared to be boxes underneath. As we descended the ramp containing panels, the panels became higher and higher off the ground. To me, the panels gave the sense of lynching victims swinging in the wind.

A view into the memorial's central plaza:

The further we walked along this section of the memorial, the more difficulty we had reading the names of the lynching victims and where they came from because the panels were so high off the ground.

The only thought that came to mind of the hanging rust-colored panels was of lynched corpses swaying in the wind.

As the panels became impossible to read, they were replaced with slabs affixed to the open walls with a very brief description of the lynching victim and his or her location. 

I was surprised to learn that females were also lynched as I don't recall knowing that had happened. After a White man's barn burned down in Rockingham County, Virginia, Charlotte Harris was lynched in 1878.

Dozens of Black sugar cane workers were lynched in 1887 for striking to protest low wages in Thibodeaux, Louisiana.

In 1877, Arthur St. Clair, a minister, was lynched in Florida's Hernando County for performing a wedding of a Black man and a White woman.

In our home state of Colorado, a mob of over 1,000 people lynched Calvin Kimblern in Pueblo. That was the first reference we noticed to Colorado.

I implore you to read this moving tribute ...

The writing on the wall said: "Thousands of African Americans are unknown victims of racial terror lynching whose deaths cannot be documented, many whose names they will never be known. They are all honored here." 

The Equal Justice Initiative Community Remembrance Project had invited community members to visit lynching sites and gather soil to honor the lives of those killed and terrorism by racial violence and injustice. This soil represented soil from over two dozen racial terror lynchings. 

Memorial Square symbolized where hundreds of racial terror lynchings took place in front of thousands of onlookers in public squares and on courthouse lawns. These public spectacle lynchings transformed community spaces where the rule of law should have been sacred into sites of terrorism and violent injustice. The Memorial Square honored all victims of racial terror lynching and acknowledged the unconscionable horror of being tortured and killed while thousands watched and cheered.

EJI believed that advancing an era of truth and racial justice required Americans to reflect more honestly reflect our true history. I couldn't possibly argue with that sentiment.

In Monument Park were duplicate monuments for each county in the country where racial terror lynchings occurred. The EJI has invited cities and counties across the country to participate in the Community Remembrance Project where local activities are planned t acknowledge each community's history of racial terror lynching.

The Ida Wells Memorial Grove honored the Black 19th century investigative journalist, an early leader in the civil rights monument, and co-founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, who said: "Our country's national crime is lynching."

Our journey through the memorial continued with the 2016 bronze sculpture, Raise Up, created by Hank Thomas about the depiction of policing in America. The sculpture showed ten Black men, encased in concrete and unable to move. It was described "as a powerful evocation of the reality of Black men in America when coming face to face with law enforcement." With their hands clearly visible, we were immediately reminded of far too many stories of unarmed Black men being killed by police officers. Thomas’ sculpture had to be seen as a connection to the present, a kind of 'call to action' that the fight for justice and liberation is ongoing. 

In my mind, The National Memorial for Peace and Justice should be on every person's list when visiting Montgomery. The history of lynchings is too important a subject for anyone not to learn all they can about the conditions that led to this dark period in this country's past.

After the emotionally draining visit to the Memorial, we needed a somewhat lighter escape and therefore drove to Oakwood Cemetery to see where Alabama native Hank Williams, one of the most significant and influential American singers of the 20th century, was buried. It was sad to learn he died before he was even 30 years old. 

A few weeks earlier, on our previous swing through Montgomery, we'd seen a statue in the city honoring the singer who had 35 singles reach the Top 10 of the Billboard Country and Western Best Sellers chart. We have seen untold memorials at cemeteries throughout the world but the one celebrating Williams' musical career counts among the most elaborate.

The memorial included some of Williams' most famous songs. 

Next post: On to Paducah, Kentucky en route to see our daughter and family in Chicago.

Posted on August 5th, 2021, from the same city as this post, Montgomery, where Steven and I have spent parts of the last three days learning even more about this nation's horrific civil rights struggles. Tomorrow, we return to Grayton Beach State Park on Florida's Panhandle for some more R&R. With news of the Delta variant being especially bad in Florida, we both will be glad to be totally well away from other people in our own cabin and on the beach. Please stay safe and mask up indoors even if you have been vaccinated.