A Memorial to The African Americans Terrorized by Lynching
On April 26, 2018, the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) opened the National Memorial for Peace and Justice which is the United States’ first memorial dedicated to the legacy of enslaved black people, people terrorized by lynching, African Americans humiliated by racial segregation and Jim Crow, and people of color burdened with contemporary presumptions of guilt and police violence.
THE MEMORIAL
The memorial is set on a six-acre site, uses sculpture, art, and design to contextualize racial terror. The memorial structure on the center of the site is constructed of over 800 corten steel monuments, one for each county in the United States where a racial terror lynching took place. The names of the lynching victims are engraved on the columns. The memorial is more than a static monument. In the six-acre park surrounding the memorial is a field of identical monuments, waiting to be claimed and installed in the counties they represent. Over time, the national memorial will serve as a report on which parts of the country have confronted the truth of this terror and which have not.
THE REPORT
In 2015, the Equal Justice Initiative in America published a report, “Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror”.The report is available online.
During the period between the Civil War and World War II, thousands of African Americans were lynched in the United States. Lynchings were violent and public acts of torture that traumatized black people throughout the country and were largely tolerated by state and federal officials. These lynchings were terrorism. “Terror lynchings” peaked between 1880 and 1940 and claimed the lives of African American men, women, and children who were forced to endure the fear, humiliation, and barbarity of this widespread phenomenon unaided.
Over the past six years, EJI staff have spent thousands of hours researching and documenting terror lynchings in the twelve most active lynching states in America: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia. We have more recently supplemented our research by documenting terror lynchings in other states, and found these acts of violence were most common in eight states: Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Maryland, Missouri, Ohio, Oklahoma, and West Virginia.
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By globalblackhistory