Visiting Montgomery, Alabama

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice (also known as the National Lynching Memorial) in Montgomery, Alabama is dedicated to telling the truth about the experience of Black people in the United States, and is a reflection of our country’s history of racial terror.

“Are you looking for a specific county?” asked an employee as we entered the memorial’s center. Of the six-acre space the center contains more than 800 hung steel rectangular blocks bearing the names of victims of lynching from various counties across the country. Beneath their names are etched the date they were hanged, burned alive, shot, drowned, or beaten to death. The man’s question immediately struck me. I had not considered that people came here to look for a specific person. That other visitors were potentially searching for their ancestors’ names among the more than 4,400 names engraved on these rectangular symbols of our nation’s atrocities.

I later thought about Ellis Island in New York City, and the millions of people who visit that space to see their ancestors’ names - names that often represent opportunistic immigration to the United States. The contrast could not be more stark. The memorial succeeds in conveying the immense weight of our country’s past sins coupled with our present day wrongdoings in many communities of color. I left ever more perceptive of how privileged I am to not have a readied response to the memorial employee’s question.

Visiting the memorial at the end of 2020 feels fitting. It’s been a heavy year of tumultuous race relations and a personal awakening to my own complacency. How can we, both individually and collectively, knowing the violent truths - past and present - of our nation, continue to turn our backs on the Black community? You cannot experience this beautifully somber memorial and not feel its impact on our responsibility to continue working towards change.