Similar to the Truth and Reconciliation Hearings in South Africa, the steel monuments are a political statement that municipalities and its constituents can’t ignore. One headline asked the question, “What next?”The Memorial invites conversation with strangers as one walks the sacred corridors where the bodies swing, lie in state.  Talk on Sunday afternoon was for reparations for the families of the deceased, that the families whose ancestors responsible for the killing pay restitution to the families harmed. We spoke about EJI setting up a fund for such donations for the families. It could be an education fund, a medical services funds, a housing fund . . . whatever the facilitated conversation between victim and perpetrator’s ancestor. We also spoke about setting up a fund for indigent prisoners.Not able to leave right away, many visitors gathered or sat at the entrance talking Sunday afternoon after our visit to discuss restorative justice practices and what facilitated conversations could look like. This would be an important next step, because most of the people walking through the Memorial were black people and white people from out of town. I met a woman who traveled all the way from Sidney, Australia. I met a lot of people from California. I would like to know what ordinary white Montgomery folks felt when they looked at the names of black people lynched in their counties.

I went to a lot of cemeteries this weekend– from Africatown, The National Memorial for Peace and Justice and then to Tuskegee to pay homage to Mr. Booker T. Washington and to Dr. George Washington Carver. We passed by the cemetery across from The First Baptist Church (also known as the Brick-A-Day Church) on North Ripley Street. Rev. Ralph Abernathy pastored there (1952-1961). It was one of the largest churches in the south. We also passed by the pastor’s home and Nat King Cole’s home too.

The River Front reminds me of the River Walk in New Orleans where the Maafa Commemoration takes place– this year is NOLA 150th Anniversary; however, the quietude which permeates Montgomery and even Selma is disturbing.

It is a false peace.
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If all these bodies can be aesthetically exhumed, then what else is there to uncover? As Stevenson says slavery did not go away, it just transformed, adapted to new circumstances. This is the city where only enslaved black people were allowed. If a black person were freed, he or she had to leave town , otherwise the papers would be null and void. There is even a Confederate White House where school kids are taken on field trips. A black woman is one of the tour guides. I wonder what she tells them . . .  as I think about a more substantive use of the children’s time. What happened at the South Carolina Statehouse three years ago is not happening in Alabama, where Gov. Kay Ivey passed a law May last year, which makes it impossible to removed a monument, rename a building or street which has been on public property for more than 40 years. “That includes most, if not all, Confederate monuments in the state” (J. Kaleem).

This means that the criminals will grace this landscape in perpetuity. ‘” The law defined schools, buildings and streets as “memorial” if they are “erected for, or named or dedicated in honor of, an event, a person, a group, a moment, or military service. She says to critics ‘all generations learn not only from our heroes and our greatest achievements, but [she does this] to ensure we learn from our mistakes and our darkest hours'” (Kaleem).

This is easy to say when one is not harmed by a system that perpetuates not darkness rather whiteness. The work of EJI continues with its National Monument to Peace and Justice and in its Legacy Museum. The stories we hear as we enter the slave chamber where holographic spirits tell us their haunting stories, stories not for the faint of heart. These stories are only amplified when we listen to the stories of modern slaves, many still alive, escapees present in the form and shape of our very own Dorsey Nunn, Executive Director, Legal Services for Prisoners with Children, and Hamdiya Cook, Chief Operating Officer, LSPWC, who with other returning citizens, give testament just by their presence to the value of such a museum, such a monument, such a place founded by a man, Bryan Stevenson who put the two together — mass incarceration and slavery visually for all with eyes to witness and act.

Of course, the concept — “The New Jim Crow,” even before Michelle Alexander, is not uniquely Stevenson’s but these monuments to lives brutally snatched from families in racially motivated terror killings is a soothing balm.  The antidote began years ago when volunteers and family members of ancestors lynched began collecting soil from the place where the crime took place. Recognition that even the earth needed healing.

Between sessions at the two day Summit, April 26-27, we watched footage of these treks to public spaces where killings took place. Often, the soil collected in large mason jars might be the only tangible part left of the person killed. Spectators mutilated, chopped up, burned . . .carried off pieces of mangled bodies as souvenirs.

At the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, there is an altar with dirt from multiple places inside a glass monument. Someone placed white roses on the top of it. The altar or “soil monument” sits across from the water running down a wall. Here visitors are “invited to remember the thousands of victims of lynching whose names will never be known.  So much of the Memorial is metaphor, a shifting metaphor . . . the Middle Passage . . . the Atlantic Slave Trade. . . the Mississippi River.

Nuecheer Franklin with visitors from Prichard, Alabama

The National Monument for Peace and Justice All photos copyright Wanda Sabir

The Legacy Museum in Montgomery, just like the prison cells and references to solitary confinement at, The National Museum for African American History and Culture in Washington, DC, does not include a place for action-steps or networking with organizations– which it should, both nationally and locally. Fliers and postcards should be available as well as information about local or regional organizations like Pastor Kenneth Glasglow’s Defense Committee is hosting Stop the “Legal Lynching” in 21st Century Alabama, May 9, 5 p.m. ET.   It will be a national call. Visit glasgowdefensecommittee.org or PastorGlasgowDefense@gmail.com He is the founder of The Ordinary People’s Society (TOPS). Rev. Glasgow’s freedom is threatened.

Other organizations are: All of Us or None and the Formerly Incarcerated and Convicted People and Family’s Movement.  I was surprised when I was in DC for the Millions for Prisoners Human Rights  march, no literature there about the huge action that weekend. But the Legacy Museum just opened so I am sure in the future such can and will probably happen.

Wanda Sabir, Mrs. Qwen Carr, (Eric Gardner’s mother); Candice Francis, ACLU, N.Cal; Jimmie C. Gardner, Exoneree. I met Jimmie at “The Millions for Prisoners Human Rights March” last year. He spoke.

Black men at Starbucks, black woman at Waffle House? Remember Denny’s? Slavery continues. Lynching continues, but not for long.  The Memorial is a way to collectively validate the worthiness of these lives — the 4000+ listed here on monuments, named and unnamed.  It is also a wake-up call to white America and to others who would strip from black Americans their human rights that we will not stand for it any longer.