A haunting, sombre memorial to African-American suffering
"And O my people, out yonder, hear me, they do not love your neck unnoosed and straight. So love your neck; put a hand on it, grace it, stroke it and hold it up. and all your inside parts that they'd just as soon slop for hogs, you got to love them. The dark, dark liver--love it, love it and the beat and beating heart, love that too. More than eyes or feet. More than lungs that have yet to draw free air. More than your life-holding womb and your life-giving private parts, hear me now, love your heart. For this is the prize."
-- Nobel laureate author Toni Morrison at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama.
It was a lovely spring morning when my friend Arif and I drove down to Montgomery, Alabama. A new memorial, National Memorial for Peace and Justice, opened here on April 24—dedicated to African Americans who had been the victims of extrajudicial killings in the post-Civil War United States.
This beautiful, dignified memorial is impossible to visit without being shaken at the cruelty visited upon African Americans. The sheer statistics are mind-boggling: Around 12 million Africans were kidnapped, enslaved and brought to the United States, and the journey was so perilous that two million died along the way.
However, this museum's main focus is on something more recent, but no less harrowing: lynching. Lynching is the practice of killing a person without any judicial process by individuals or a community who arbitrarily decide the punishment.
One realises that as egregious as the human capacity for oppression is, the ability to be in denial about outrageous barbarity seems just as unconscionable.
A tendency to airbrush history has resulted in a penchant for ignoring the horrors visited upon African Americans after emancipation. The museum notes that from 1877 to 1950, over 4.400 lynchings of African Americans have been documented. This happened in front of people ranging from two to 10,000. These extrajudicial murders happened in broad daylight, often in front of crowds.
While lynching was not unheard of in the frontier region of the American West, what's remarkable is that the lynching in the South that targeted African Americans happened in communities with fully functioning courts.
Black people were lynched by hanging, drowning, shooting, beating, burning or stabbing. They could be killed for economic success, political organising, or for reasons as flimsy as failing to address a white person as "sir."
Blacks had nowhere to go—the US Supreme Court's rulings provided support to white racists; the federal government essentially washed its hands after repeated efforts to pass anti-lynching laws failed after recalcitrant Southern lawmakers balked. In a word, a complete meltdown of social justice.
The memorial leads visitors through a series of informative banners. There is little need for embellishment because the facts are shocking enough. Visitors pass by a set of sculptures that are heart-breaking to see. These remarkably vivid sculptures capture the fear and pain of enslaved human beings who can be tortured at the whim of a white master or overseer.
Visitors are then led into a memorial area where rows of six-foot-long metallic boxes stand. Each box represents a county in the (mainly Southern) United States. On each box, names of lynching victims are engraved. Many names are not known—there it's just mentioned that the name of the victim is unknown.
Equal Justice Initiative, the nonprofit advocacy organisation that built the museum, did meticulous research to document the number and identity of lynching victims. The museum says—with considerable justification—that slavery never really went away; it just evolved. Between 1910 and 1970, six million blacks fled the South to escape the terrible racial injustice and violence of the region.
At the museum, visitors gently descend along a declining floor, but the coffin-like boxes commemorating lynching victims are at the same level. As we went further and further down, the coffin-like structures we looked down at earlier are suspended from a high ceiling. It's as if the spirits are gradually soaring.
On the walls, informative banners give a sense of the intense atmosphere of racist violence of that era. "Seven black people were lynched near Screamer, Alabama, in 1888 for drinking from a white man's well," one banner informs.
"Lynchings in America were not isolated hate crimes committed by rogue vigilantes," the museum declares. "Lynchings were targeted racial violence perpetrated to uphold an unjust social order. Lynchings were terrorism."
Visitors finally descend into a sort of basement level, where water runs down a wall, adding a soothing noise to a dark and cosy area. On that wall is the poignant inscription: "Thousands of African Americans are unknown victims of racial terror, whose deaths cannot be documented, many whose names will never be known. They are all honored here."
A garden and gentle, undulating waves of a grassy knoll outside make the memorial a place for gentle, sombre reflection—a place for a wrenching contemplation of man's inhumanity to man.
It is remarkable how extraordinarily well the entire project was executed. Surrounded by well-sculpted and well-tended greens, the architectural structure is also impressive and deeply affecting.
What impressed me most, however, is the overall tone of the museum. Notwithstanding the pain and sadness, organisers are nevertheless firmly anchored in all the factual information they have mustered. Nobody is ever vicious or vindictive, though Lord knows there is enough provocation. This serene yet determined tone is best epitomised by the moving message as the visit ends:
"For the hanged and the beaten/For the shot, drowned, and burned/ For the tortured, tormented, and terrorized/ For those abandoned by the rule of law,
"We will remember.
"With hope because hopelessness is the enemy of justice/ With courage because peace requires bravery/ With persistence because justice is a constant struggle/ With faith because we shall overcome."
Ashfaque Swapan is a contributing editor for Siliconeer, a monthly periodical for South Asians in the United States.
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