A powerful memorial in Alabama remembers the victims of lynching
MONTGOMERY, Ala. - The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, a somber, hilltop pergola of rusted steel overlooking the city that saw the birth of both the Confederacy and the civil rights movement, is one of the most powerful and effective new memorials created in a generation. When it opens on Thursday, this ambitious project will force America to confront not only its wretched history of lynching and racial terror, but an ongoing legacy of fear and trauma that stretches unbroken from the days of slavery to the Black Lives Matter movement of today.
As clearsighted, uncompromising and architecturally effective as any American design since Maya Lin's 1982 Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the memorial sits in a mostly blighted neighborhood, overlooking the city where Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat in 1955. It is symbolically placed on high ground about a mile from the hill that hosts both the state capitol building and an abundance of Confederate statues, including an ornamental column celebrating Alabama's Civil War dead as "the knightliest of the knightly race." Even more remarkable, this memorial, comprising more than 800 coffin-shaped boxes of oxidized steel hanging from a square canopy, was built on a budget of only $15 million, in an age when major national memorials tend to cost $100 million and up.
The memorial is the project of Bryan Stevenson and his Equal Justice Initiative, a nonprofit legal and civil rights group that represents poor defendants, including juvenile offenders and death-row inmates. Stevenson, a 1995 winner of a MacArthur "genius" grant, set up the EJI more than two decades ago to focus on death-penalty cases. In recent years, he has expanded its role to include research into the criminal justice system and the history of lynching. In 2015, the group issued a comprehensive report on lynching that added some 700 new cases to the tally of how many African-Americans lost their lives to extralegal and mob violence between 1877 and 1950.
That work led to Stevenson's desire to memorialize the victims, and to do it in the American South, where the vast majority of these killings took place - often in public spectacles announced and celebrated by the local media. "The question I used to get," says Stevenson, "was why don't you do this in Washington, D.C.? And I just really believe it is important for Americans to make the journey, take the trip, and get proximate to the part of this country where this legacy was most intensely felt."
Designed by Stevenson and his colleagues at EJI in collaboration with the Boston-based MASS Design Group, the memorial doesn't break new formal ground and is clearly inspired by other monuments. Stevenson is deeply conversant in the recent history of memorial architecture, citing the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, Peter Eisenman's Holocaust Memorial in Berlin and the Lincoln Memorial in Washington among his inspirations. The design shows signs of all these precedents, from its first impression at a distance, in which it resembles the colonnade of the Lincoln Memorial. Upon closer approach, most of these Corten steel "monuments," which seem at first to be columns, are revealed as suspended forms.
Once inside the memorial, visitors descend through four long corridors, arranged at right angles, and the monuments begin to form what looks like an ominous carillon of silent bells suspended over head. The descent into this space explicitly recalls the experience of Peter Eisenman's sunken concrete jungle near Berlin's Brandenburg Gate, in which the outside world disappears, replaced by a disorienting landscape of unyielding, funereal boxlike forms.
Despite these precedents, the memorial reconfigures old elements in a distinctly new way, and avoids both the slick and generic symbolism and the Hollywood bathos of many recent American memorials. Stevenson said he wanted to avoid any sense of false narrative uplift. The memorial had to focus on the impact and legacy of lynching, which often involved amputations, mutilation, torture and castration.
"The people who carried out this violence could have just shot people and buried them in the ground, but they didn't want it to be a secret, they didn't want it hidden, they didn't want it obscured by dirt and dust," he says. "They actually lifted up the bodies because they wanted to terrorize. They wanted the entire community to see it." And so they photographed the lynchings, made postcards from the images, and distributed flesh torn from the body as souvenirs.
The memorial is located a few blocks from the EJI's small but powerful new museum, which explains lynching as a direct legacy of slavery, a way of enforcing white supremacy and a de facto extension of the slave system after its legal abolition. Exhibits explore a consistent history of violence and control over African-Americans: If lynching was a way of sustaining the exploitation of slavery, mass incarceration continues to extend the trauma of lynching with devastating damage to black families and communities.
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