Montgomery, Alabama is chock full of disturbing history: From the earliest days of settlers displacing indigenous peoples, to becoming a prominent slave auction site, to its distinction as the “first capitol of the Confederacy,” to civil rights violence (and lots of other things I missed in between). Good things happened here, too, and the citizens love their city despite it all.
I visited with a group of educators working on a multi-year grant through the Department of Education. (Our Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage is a partner in the grant.) REACH (Race, Equity, Arts and Cultural History) “proposes a five-year project to establish a national replicable model that will strengthen the fiber of arts learning and harness the learning and effectiveness of arts integration as a catalyst for increasing student engagement and achievement” and is in a large part the brainchild of my esteemed colleague, Denise Davis-Cotton, from the University of South Florida’s Center for Partnerships in Arts-Integrated Teaching. Denise is from Montgomery and wanted our first year’s museum studies site visit to take place there, at the many excellent Civil Rights sites.
It was a whirlwind tour. Our group visited two or three sites a day, including the Rosa Parks Museum, the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, the Freedom Rides museum, the Legacy Museum, and several other sites. A lot to take in and process.
To me, the most memorable of all of these highly memorable sites was the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. When I told some friends about visiting the memorial, they said, “Oh, you mean the Lynching Memorial.” Well, that’s a big part of the story, but not all of it. This is a memorial for healing, not just for documenting in a very emotionally affective way the legacy of over 4,000 known lynchings in our country.
Still, the terrible history of lynching as an unchecked practice in much of the U.S. between the Civil War and World War II is the largest part of this incredible installation. Row upon row of metal columns list states, counties and names of the people who lost their lives to individuals or mobs who somehow thought they were meting out justice in their hate-twisted minds.
Interpreters are on hand to unpack some of what you see, and add in even more disturbing facts from the extensive research that has been carried out for the memorial. I talked to one of them, Ricky Blackmon, about why he decided to work at the Memorial, as I was thinking it must be hard to fill in the blanks created by these lists of victims with descriptions of public lynchings, souvenirs made of human flesh, and other unbelievable but true stories. “I do it for my grandparents,” he told me. “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
If I had not already been on the verge of tears by then (about a quarter of the way through the memorial), I was then. And I can’t help crying again while writing this.
If you find yourself in Montgomery, don’t skip a visit to this incredible installation. And talk to the interpreters. But meanwhile, here are some photos I took.
