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New national monument to America's 4300 lynching victims opens Spring, 2018

T

theignoramus

Member
On the corner of Washington and Decatur streets in Montgomery, Alabama, a visitor can feel history pressing in from every side. Just down the street is the church where Martin Luther King Jr. and others planned the Montgomery bus boycott. Two blocks away sits the First White House of the Confederacy, where Jefferson Davis once lived. But although the city is crowded with historical markers—including, by one count, 59 Confederate memorials, and a similar number devoted to the civil-rights movement—you won’t find many markers of the racial violence following Reconstruction.
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Soon, however, on a six-acre site overlooking Montgomery’s Cottage Hill neighborhood, just a stone’s throw from the Rosa Parks Museum, the Memorial to Peace and Justice [1] will serve as a national monument to the victims of lynchings. It will be the first such memorial in the U.S., and, its founders hope, it will show how lynchings of black people were essential to maintaining white power in the Jim Crow South.
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Two years ago, EJI completed an ambitious tally of the black Americans hanged, burned alive, shot, drowned, beaten, or otherwise murdered by white mobs from 1877 to 1950. EJI’s original report identified 4,075 victims, a sizable increase from previous estimates. Since then, the list of killings has continued to grow; it now stands at 4,384.
Two years ago, EJI completed an ambitious tally of the black Americans hanged, burned alive, shot, drowned, beaten, or otherwise murdered by white mobs from 1877 to 1950. EJI’s original report identified 4,075 victims, a sizable increase from previous estimates. Since then, the list of killings has continued to grow; it now stands at 4,384.
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the memorial’s design comprises 816 suspended columns, each representing a U.S. county in which EJI has documented lynchings, with the names of that county’s known victims inscribed [2]. The columns will be made of Corten steel, a material that oxidizes when exposed to weather; over time, rust may bleed onto nearby surfaces. (The metal was used to great effect in the Barclays Center in Brooklyn.) Viewers walking through the pavilion will gradually descend. As they do, the rust-colored columns will hang above them [3], a frank suggestion of dangling corpses.
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https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/11/a-national-monument-to-america-s-known-victims-of-lynching/540663/?utm_source=poltw
Many of us will likely have bitter thoughts and angry reflections about why it took until 2018 for the thousands of Black American lynching victims to be properly recognised and commemorated at a national memorial, but I suppose it's better late than never.
This is a much welcome and much needed contrast to Confederate nostalgia and memorabilia and I could see it becoming a pilgrimage site, much like the 911 memorial.

National Lynching Memorial Preview
 
P

pelicansurf

Needs a Holiday on Gallifrey
That statue is going to get vandalized like crazy, but I'm very glad it's actually getting made. Hopefully more statues like this start popping up.
 
T

theignoramus

Member
pelicansurf said:
That statue is going to get vandalized like crazy, but I'm very glad it's actually getting made. Hopefully more statues like this start popping up.
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Its not a statue, it's thousands of columns that will hang from a ceiling. The perimeter of the site is like 6 acres. Watch the video in the op.
 
X

Xe4

Banned
It does suck that it took so long to get put up, and that it took a private citizen/company (as opposed to the government) to do it. But it's good that it's being made, and being placed in the south.
 
W

WiiredShawn

Member
Shit. That video made me teary-eyed.

It's a really great concept - the abstraction makes it broadly palatable, but the structure sends a poignant message. I'm glad something like this is allowed to exist.

Now to wait for conservatives to become unreasonably outraged.
 
N

noquarter

Member
Wow, seems like a really good memorial from watching that video.

Like that there will be duplicates of each column outside that will be put into each of the counties represented.
 
D

Dyle

Member
I love that they will be sending mini-memorials to every county where people were lynched, it's a really novel concept of making a core monument that reaches out to touch the larger American population. The centralization of our remembrance of history in state and national capitols is problematic and this seems like a large step forward in developing a unified, nationwide remembrance of our past. If I ever make it down to Montgomery I'll be sure to pay my respects there.
 
I

Inuhanyou

Believes Dragon Quest is a franchise managed by Sony
Pretty sure there are plenty more than we just don't have on record as well
 
R

Rumblebones

Banned
Stay vigilant, America.

Some racist fuckery is bound to happen in this political climate with white supremacists in the White House.
 
H

Hubbl3

Unconfirmed Member
That'll be an amazing monument when it's done if it goes according to that preview video. Kind of unfortunate it's going up in Montgomery though as I have zero desire to travel to or through Alabama. But if I ever find myself there after its completion date, I'll definitely check it out.

I also appreciate that that channel disabled comments and likes/dislikes
 
A

Angelus Errare

Banned
My great grandfather is one of those 4300

He also served in WWII, he was lynched not even a year after he came back home.

To put into perspective how not long ago that was, my great grandmother died in 2013.
 
B

BunnyBear

Member
Hubbl3 said:
That'll be an amazing monument when it's done if it goes according to that preview video. Kind of unfortunate it's going up in Montgomery though as I have zero desire to travel to or through Alabama. But if I ever find myself there after its completion date, I'll definitely check it out.

I also appreciate that that channel disabled comments and likes/dislikes
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I travelled through Montgomery last year and loved it. You’re missing out. They honour history really well and the downtown area and riverside area is brilliant.

It’s history is fucked but Montgomery is a nice place.
 
R

Rumblebones

Banned
That number is way, way, way low.

Black lives were worth fuck all.

Murder of former property wasn't exactly a top priority to cops back then.
 
S

Shoeless

Member
I wonder if there will be any arguments in the South about how it's important to not acknowledge history with these kinds of monuments, while at the same time emphasizing how important it is to preserve Confederate history because "That's different somehow in a way I can't explain, and if you try to argue the point with reason and logic, I will respond with anger and violence."
 
T

theignoramus

Member
Rumblebones said:
That number is way, way, way low.

Black lives were worth fuck all.

Murder of former property wasn't exactly a top priority to cops back then.
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I think theyre exclusively counting public lynchings documented in newspapers and public records from that era. I dont think theyve counted race riot victims or the more discrete racist murders that occurred. I know the body count from Reconstruction era violence alone is in the thousands.

Even still, we're talking about over 4,000 documented incidents of a Black person being brutally murdered by a group of dozens or hundreds or people, then the corpse being further mutilated and put on public display. Just one incident like that is enough to traumatise a whole community, let alone 4300 of them decade after decade.
 
C

CHC

Member
Sounds like it will be a beautiful and respectful monument.

They need to hire Acererak to trap this thing up, though.... turn it into a meat grinder for the inevitable racist vandals. Sad that the first thing that comes to my mind are the vandals....
 
D

Deleted member 80556

Unconfirmed Member
The columns having a duplicate waiting just outside for the counties to reclaim it and hopefully learn from their history got a tear out of me. Very beautiful.
 
P

PaulloDEC

Member
Seems like a really thoughtful and sobering design. I love the added touch of the "temporary" pillars outside waiting to be claimed by their counties.

Hopefully they can find a way to incorporate a bunch of security cameras into it.
 
F

Fuchsdh

Member
Inuhanyou said:
Pretty sure there are plenty more than we just don't have on record as well
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I'm sure the number is higher as well, although the fact that it's not tens or hundreds of thousands probably drives home the point that it didn't *need* to be. Most lynchings, especially during the turn of the century, were public affairs for a reason; you don't need to kill a bunch of people to instill the fear that you could for pretty much any reason. It's smart to focus on the verified cases, though, especially when you can put names to the crimes.

Not a big fan of the design personally, I guess I'm a traditionalist when it comes to monuments, but the idea of "take home memorials" is a pretty neat idea, and the collected dirt concept is pretty evocative.
 
V

Volimar

Member
God, imagine how many people were lynched by racist law enforcement who were then just written off to their families as having run off.
 
E

EdibleKnife

Member
OrangeGrayBlue said:
I'm sure they'll all accept that "you can't change history" like they so easily do when defending statues of Confederate generals.
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Only history that glorifies whiteness and hides atrocities is worth defending. I’d love to see the “you’re erasing history” types (Trump in particular) actually visit this monument and try to make an argument as to why it shouldn’t exists or why their statues to “Confederate heroes” should.

shaneo632 said:
I'm honestly surprised the number isn't a lot higher than 4300.
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Like has been said, it is. This is simply the amount whose lynchings were actively, publicly recorded. There’s black slaughter committed beyond that.
 
G

Greigor The Fellhand

Member
I like the concept behind this monument however I think some of the design choices are odd, I predict many people tripping and hitting there head on the columns.

I support it.

did they use the source engine for hte video?
 
M

M.J. Doja

Banned
Hubbl3 said:
That'll be an amazing monument when it's done if it goes according to that preview video. Kind of unfortunate it's going up in Montgomery though as I have zero desire to travel to or through Alabama. But if I ever find myself there after its completion date, I'll definitely check it out.

I also appreciate that that channel disabled comments and likes/dislikes
Click to expand...

100% Same feeling here.
 
E

Enduin

No bald cap? Lies!
That's really great. We need more installations like this all over. There's sadly no shortage of terrible events from our past that we can be more upfront and honest about that sadly many people have absolutely zero knowledge of.
 
L

Lunar15

Member
This is the history we should never forget. Not the idealization of people who fought for the false concept of racial superiority.
 
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