New memorial ends the 'silence' on a history of lynching

In July 1933, Elizabeth Lawrence walked down a road just outside of Birmingham when a group of white children began to hurl stones at her. Lawrence responded the way most of us would respond: she reprimanded the children.

Later that night, a mob appeared at Lawrence's door, seized her, lynched her and burned her home to the ground. When her son, Alexander, attempted to report the murder of his mother to the local sheriff, the mob turned its attention to him. Fearing for his life, Alexander fled to Boston. He was one of six million African Americans who fled the racial terror of the South during the great migration.

Lawrence was murdered by her community. Not for committing a crime, but for daring to ask for dignity in the Jim Crow South. By scolding white children, Lawrence had transgressed the established social boundaries. And she died for it. One of 29 documented lynchings in Jefferson County, of 361 reported lynchings in Alabama.

In 1934, a mob seized Claude Neal from a jail cell in Brewton, Alabama, carrying him to Jackson County, Florida, where he was castrated, stabbed, branded with hot irons, had his toes and fingers removed, and was hanged upside down. And this was before the mob killed him.

Afterward, the mob hung his body on display while a crowd of 2,000 gathered around, further mutilating his body long after he had died. Families visited and took pictures next to Neal's body. For entertainment. Postcards were made of the images and sold for 50 cents each. For posterity. When the sheriff finally took his body down, the mob demanded he put it back outside the courthouse.

He refused, and the white mob rioted, injuring more than 200 black residents before the Florida National Guard eventually stepped in.

Though accused of a raping a white woman, Neal never received a trial. And the bloodlust of the mob went beyond a quest for justice. The attack on black Floridians signaled it was never about justice at all. It was about maintaining racial dominance.

For 80 years, the names of Lawrence and Neal have been missing from American history. They're not mentioned in school books alongside Emmett Till. They're remembered in stories passed down in places like Boston, Los Angeles and Detroit, by family members that fled nearly a century of state-sanctioned racial terror. But no markers designated their murders.

Until this week.

On Thursday, in Montgomery, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice will open to the public. A stunning - and sobering - six-acre park overlooking the city, the project spearhead by the Equal Justice Initiative is the first memorial in the country dedicated to the stories of more than 4,400 documented lynching victims.

In a press preview on Monday, Bryan Stevenson, EJI founder and executive director, drew parallels to Holocaust memorials in Germany, Stevenson discussed the importance of engaging with a true history, and signaling to the world "never again."

The majority of the memorial is built around a square of 800 six-foot monuments, one for every documented county where this terrorism took place. The names of the lynching victims are engraved on the columns. As visitors walk around the memorial, the path gradually descends so that the monuments shift from eye level to a hanging display overhead. The steel columns are designed to weather and change color over time. From a distance, each looks the same, but as you approach them you see different imperfections, variations and colorations, evoking the reality that while this was a massive national tragedy, the victims were individuals. The visual effect is the sensation of looking at hundreds of brown bodies hanging above you.

When asked about the significance of having the monuments overhead - and the design of the memorial square - Stevenson said lynchings were designed to be public messages.

Lynchings often happened in a courthouse square. They involved local leaders like mayors and sheriffs. They were advertised in advance in newspapers. They, in many ways, were community events. Bodies hung on display from trees and poles and bridges. Crowds gathered to mutilate the flesh of the victims, or pose their children for pictures.

From the moment Federal troops withdrew from the South in 1877, racial violence was public and widespread - designed to strike fear into the hearts of black Americans and dehumanize them. It was a signal to the world to stay silent in the face of our caste system and to maintain segregation at all costs. In particularly brutal moments, some black Southerners were murdered for attempting to escape to the North, signaling that so much Southern wealth still depended on black labor.

Lynch mobs didn't erase the evidence of their crimes in the moment, because they recognized the power of the message they were sending. They knew society would turn a blind eye to their actions.

But that began to change in the middle of the 20th century.

Beginning in the 1950s, a legislative transformation spurred by the Civil Rights Movement - building on the work of pioneering journalists like Ida B. Wells who led the charge against lynching in the early 1900s - led to a country more willing to prosecute and convict hate crimes. Jim Crow laws prohibited state-sanctioned segregation and, gradually, much of America began to recognize the horror of their actions.

But recognition does not always lead to action, and society has never publicly acknowledged its role in the era of racial lynching. While lynch mobs didn't erase it in the moment, society has willingly erased the evidence over time, scrubbing it from our public spaces and from our collective memory.

Textbooks often gloss over the horrors of the Transatlantic Slave Trade or perpetuate a Lost Cause-driven mythology when discussing the Civil War. Some will highlight black leaders like Harriet Tubman or Frederick Douglass but we're largely silent about the impact of enslavement, lynching and segregation on generations of black Americans.

"We've been practicing silence for so long," said Stevenson, noting that there's a long line of silence from slavery to mass incarceration.

And because we don't engage with that history, we keep recreating it through new structures and institutions that rely on the same fears.

And we've replaced painful histories with comfortable myths.

It feels appropriate that the press preview for the new memorial occurred on one of three state holidays dedicated to the Confederacy, at a time when Gov. Kay Ivey is building a campaign around promising to protect Confederate monuments. Around the country, the same public squares that once held black bodies continue to house Confederate tributes. There are 59 such monuments and memorials to the Confederacy in Montgomery alone.

In opening the new memorial, and an accompanying Legacy Museum tracking the evolution from slavery to mass incarceration, Stevenson pointed to why Montgomery was such a fitting home.

Montgomery was a city built by slavery, becoming one of the most prominent hubs for domestic slave trade. By 1850, there were more slaves sold in Montgomery than in New Orleans. Slaves built the railroads that connected the city to the rest of the South. And when Southern states seceded from the United States to preserve and maintain the institution of slavery, Montgomery became the first capital of the Confederacy. Later, the county had one of the highest lynching rates in the region and legislative policies have established Alabama as one of the country's worst homes for mass incarceration.

But when Ivey and politicians talk about "learning from our history," those aren't the stories they tell.. The South doesn't name bridges and roads after the White Southerners who spoke for abolition. Or build monuments to people who fought for integration. We can't learn from history if we don't fully confront it.

And when black Americans dare to speak out about this history, they're often told to "quit dwelling on the past." Often by the same people obsessed with a 19th-century South.

Some will write off these new memorials as a tribute to "white guilt" but Stevenson was quick to note that the memorial is not a punitive project. The Equal Justice Initiative has built its foundation on the idea that America is too punitive. This is a project about healing and justice.

"Each of us is better than the worst thing we've ever done," Stevenson is fond of saying.

This is also about breaking a cycle of repetition. Until we are willing to confront our history, it will continue to manifest itself in other broken systems -- like mass incarceration and police brutality.

"There's a more just America still waiting," says Stevenson.

EJI's memorial is built to facilitate that.

Each of the 800 columns has a twin, an exact replica for each county that can be claimed by those willing to grapple with their histories and relocate them to their communities. Lynchings happened locally, and Stevenson believes that the healing must also happen locally. The twin columns surround the main square, and as counties claim their history, the memorial will evolve and serve as a sort of "visual postcard," signaling which communities will wrestle with hard truths.

And which won't.