Published in Apr 2018

How to Remember Lynching

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice recently opened in Montgomery, Alabama, to great fanfare. The memorial tells the stories of the more than 4,000 recorded lynchings perpetrated against black men, women and children by American terrorists for nearly 100 years. The crimes were gruesome public spectacle. Victims died by gunshots, hanging, fire, dismemberment and castration. The massacres took place mostly in the South but not entirely. Lynch law was a nationwide phenomenon and while unwritten it was defended as much as any legislation on the books.

As important as it is for the victims to be named and remembered it is important to think about how we should do so. The most important reason to remember painful past events is to direct ourselves politically in the present. There is an understandable temptation to make our experience as visible as that of others whose suffering has been elevated above ours. There was a memorial to the European Jewish holocaust on the Washington mall before there were museums dedicated to African American or Native American history. The oversight isn’t surprising. The genocides which took place on United States soil were ignored precisely because they took place here. Any acknowledgement would have touched too many raw nerves.

The system in this country was built with anti-black racism as its foundation. Generations of our people have struggled mightily against it and studying their successes and failures is essential. That study should include knowing the awful crimes that are exposed in Montgomery but it can’t end there. The horror lives on and will continue as long as we remain within the confines of what already oppresses us. We have seen this history and we know how it ends.

Read the original article on blackagendareport.


By Margaret Kimberley