Supremacy at the visible seat of judicial and political authority. Lynchings were performed as collective, violent affirmations of white The many town squares, often in front of county courthouses, where At the center of the overallĪssemblage is an open empty space, the “Memorial Square,” evocative of Names are illuminated, a series of hundreds of memorial candles lit in A light is positioned under each column, so that at night, the
Of each person lynched within the county, arranged in chronological Also inscribed on a face of the column are the names The name of a specific county within which lynchings are known to haveīeen perpetrated. Size of a coffin, hang vertically from the roof. The many generations bound together by the shared legacies ofĪt the hill’s apex we enter into a vast square-shaped structure,ĭesigned by MASS Design group of Boston. Pregnancy, picked up again much later in the memorial journey, evokes One crouching femaleįigure is clearly pregnant, perhaps about to give birth. Transatlantic slave trade through a circle of six African men and womenĬhained together in contorted positions of torment. (“Twisting”) by Ghanian sculptor Kwame Akoto-Bamfo evokes the Gwendolyn Brooks’ poetic couplet, “The lariat lynch-wish I deplored/The loveliest lynchee was our Lord.” Halfway up we encounter the first of three figurative sculpture groupings in the park. The equation of lynching victims with the crucifiedĬhrist has a long history in African American thought, culminating in Hill outside of Jerusalem’s ancient walls where Jesus is believed to Walking along these walls up the path towards the lurking structureĪt its summit, it is hard not to be reminded of Golgotha or Calvary, the Parcel of the emergence of institutions of white domination sometimes Oppression in the decades following the end of Reconstruction, part and Lynching, as we normally use the term, was a mass strategy of racial
Refusing to step off the curb for an approaching white person.) (SomeĪfrican Americans were lynched specifically for registering to vote, or Intimidating, and disempowering entire communities of color. Lynching, the subject of the memorial, are acts of murderous violenceĪgainst persons of color with the specific intent of terrorizing, In a broad sense, lynching can be defined as a killingīy two or more persons outside of the sanction of law. Thoughtful written commentaries contextualizing racial lynching inĪmerican history. Along the path, on the wall, we encounter Structure atop a hill, within which we can already glimpse hundreds of They move upwards along a gradual curving path towards a large central As visitors enter into the enclosed space, Storied community that played an important role in the Montgomery busīoycott of the mid-1950s. The memorial park is walled off from the surrounding neighborhood, a
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