The Lynching Memorial in Alabama Will Be a Truth We Cannot Flee

Build it now.

Hand, Temple, Protest, Flag, Rebellion, Finial,
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There are very few people in public life who are doing what is so obviously god's work as Bryan Stevenson, something this lucid profile from Jeffrey Toobin in The New Yorker makes very clear. And while Stevenson's work in the courtroom is unquestionably a towering achievement, it is a project of his in Montgomery that also is undeniably an act of courage. He wants to create a national memorial to the victims of lynching.

After Stevenson's speech, the volunteers headed out in small teams to fill gallon-size glass jugs with soil from the sites of the three hundred and sixty-three lynchings that E.J.I. had documented in Alabama. Many of the sites are approximate, and the soil project, which has been going on for about a year, is meant to be symbolic rather than scientific. Along the back wall of the room where Stevenson was speaking were about a hundred jugs already filled with soil. The colors of the soil samples varied, from nearly black, in the Black Belt communities across the middle of the state (which was named for its rich soil as well as for its ethnic composition), to the tan, sandy soil from the Gulf Coast, around Mobile. The names of the victims and the dates of their deaths, which ranged from 1877 to 1950, are marked on the jugs. The soil-collection project is part of a plan to erect the first national memorial to lynching victims, to be built on six acres of vacant land in downtown Montgomery. The project will cost twenty million dollars, and will include a museum at E.J.I. headquarters. It will transform the look, and perhaps the reputation, of Montgomery. A key part of the plan is a dare to the communities in which the lynchings took place. "We're going to name thousands of people who were the victims of lynchings," Stevenson told the group before they received their trowels and jars. "We're going to create a space where you can walk and spend time and go through that represents these lynchings. But, more than that, we're going to challenge every county in this country where a lynching took place to come and claim a memorial piece—and to erect it in their county."

This country has needed a serious homegrown kind of Truth and Reconciliation Commission literally for centuries now. We need to acknowledge thoroughly the crimes and the murder and the blood that provided so much of the foundation of what we call American Exceptionalism. We needed one in 1865. We needed one after Wounded Knee and Sand Creek. We needed one in the late 1960's. We need one today.

Bryan Stevenson
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What Stevenson is planning here is nothing more than a spur to a permanent and honest discussion of our history, and of what some Americans have done to other Americans. Lynchings are part of that. The national government couldn't even pass a federal law to criminalize extrajudicial murder. In 1894, the Congress wouldn't even fund a commission to study the problem. In 1929, a bill that even President Warren Harding supported died in a Senate filibuster. Four years later, Franklin Roosevelt took a dive in order to save the coalition that was passing his New Deal legislation.

Then, in 1948, Harry Truman took a whack at it. This was the reply by a certain Congressman Charles Bennett, Democrat of Florida.

I oppose the enactment of the proposed so-called antilynching bills for a variety of reasons. First of all, I think that the bills are unconstitutional as a violation of the tenth amendment of the Constitution. The Constitution would probably never have been enacted if it had not been for the inclusion of the tenth amendment which is part of the Bill of Rights. It provides that when governmental powers are not given specifically to the Federal Government, they shall remain with the people or the States into which these people may organize themselves or have organized themselves. Along that same line, I oppose this type of legislation because I feel that it is projecting still further the Federal Government into local government which trend in government in late years I feel to be a mistake and a very dangerous mistake. When our country was founded, it was founded through experience. The colonists had experienced a remote governmental control and they desired to return to what they had experienced somewhat when they were in Europe which was more of a local control; plus that they desired to add to the grass-roots control that they anticipated being able to have in this country. In other words, they rebelled against being controlled remotely from England and they wanted to get even a heartier participation in local government than they found possible in England itself when they were actually living in that country or whatever country they happened to live in in Europe.

There are too many echoes of Congressman Bennett resounding in our politics today. Substitute "Clean Water Act" or "National Parks" for "lynching," and someone could have given that speech to the Republican convention and they'd still be cheering for it. Radical Tentherism eventually ends in poisoned rivers. Radical Tentherism ends in strange fruit.

More from the honorable gentleman from Florida:

Many people do not understand the background of what brought about lynchings. Of course, some lynchings occurred prior to the War Between the States. There were many lynchings after the War Between the States when the Federal Government, despite the provisions of the Federal Constitution, saw fit, by fire and sword, to force back into the Union the States which had decided and determined their desire to be out of the Union. When the Federal Government did that, it did not use the kindly hand of Abraham Lincoln, nor the somewhat faltering but kindly hand of Andrew Johnson, but the Senate and the House of Representatives ruled the South with an iron hand. They sent down people to control the government; they allowed and encouraged people to assume high office who were not capable of assuming those offices. They overlooked and countenanced great corruption which led to the demoralization of the Government. With that picture before them, as heinous and as culpable as taking the life of another man is without a just and due trial, these people, some people in the South, at least, took upon themselves to try to gain some sort of order and some sort of government since the constituted government offered them no protection. Therefore, in the early days, there were reasons why lynchings were indulged in and reasons why many good people at least overlooked them.

Build that monument. Let there be one place where those echoes die.


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