The National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montegomery Alabama

[iu_a_att]

A museum in Montgomery Alabama memorializes all the victims of lynchings.
Such a museum seems like a long time in coming...over 4000 people lynched...seems like a profound way to begin coming to terms with our darkest shadows.

 

[iu_a_att]

An article about the "re" discovery of lynching photographs.
https://www.montgomeryadvertiser.co...tuary-and-how-we-remember-lynching/499641002/

When the first public exhibition opened in New York in 2000, The New York Times said the images “burn a hole in your heart.”

“These images are not going to soften into any artistic realm,” the newspaper wrote. “Instead they send shock waves through the brain, implicating ever larger chunks of American society and in many ways reaching up to the present. They give one a deeper and far sadder understanding of what it has meant to be white and to be black in America. And what it still means.”​

 

[Rockfish1]

A museum in Montgomery Alabama memorializes all the victims of lynchings.
Such a museum seems like a long time in coming...over 4000 people lynched...seems like a profound way to begin coming to terms with our darkest shadows.

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That's an inspiring creative concept. If my county is on the list, I hope we bring our column out of purgatory at the earliest possible date.

 

[Rockfish1]

An article about the "re" discovery of lynching photographs.
https://www.montgomeryadvertiser.co...tuary-and-how-we-remember-lynching/499641002/

When the first public exhibition opened in New York in 2000, The New York Times said the images “burn a hole in your heart.”

“These images are not going to soften into any artistic realm,” the newspaper wrote. “Instead they send shock waves through the brain, implicating ever larger chunks of American society and in many ways reaching up to the present. They give one a deeper and far sadder understanding of what it has meant to be white and to be black in America. And what it still means.”​

Lynching photos aren't horrifying merely for the terrible sight of black people hanging from trees, but also from the ordinary everyday white people happy to be seen milling about their hanging bodies.

 

[iu_a_att]

Lynching photos aren't horrifying merely for the terrible sight of black people hanging from trees, but also from the ordinary everyday white people happy to be seen milling about their hanging bodies.

You are right...I find the images so deeply disturbing that I can't look at them. What traumas the lynchers inflicted on their victims and on everyone else in the community. Awful.

 

[37Hoosier]

And yet the generations that follow fight, and will even kill, to honor statues that honor those who sought to preserve that "heritage". Almost seems like something off the twi light zone if we were not witnessing it ourselves. Our heritage as white trash must be preserved they dream

 

[iu_a_att]

The Montgomery Advertiser (newspaper in Montgomery Ala) acknowledges its place in history as it justified lynching. While opposition to lynching is relatively costless to the paper today it will no doubt still disturb the amygdala's of its many white readers who still identify with the confederacy. So kudos to the newspaper. It is a meaningful gesture that takes us in the right direction as a nation.

 

[iu_a_att]

good article from Jamelle Bouie

Neither the memorial nor the museum shies away from calling lynching what it was—“racial terror violence.” Terrorism is a loaded term, but Bryan Stevenson, whose nonprofit Equal Justice Initiative organized and built the memorial and the accompanying Legacy Museum, embraces it and its implications. “When a black person was lynched, they were not just lynching that person, they were targeting the entire African-American community,” said Stevenson. “Nobody thinks that the 9/11 perpetrators were just trying to kill only the people who worked at the World Trade Tower. They were trying to terrorize the rest of us, and that’s the reason why we felt justified in fighting a war. I look at the exodus of 6 million people who flee the American South during this period as victims of lynching, even though they weren’t strung up. And in that respect, you have to use the word terrorism to characterize this violence.”​

 

[iu_a_att]

The NY Times covers the ways in which southern newspapers encouraged and promoted lynching. Including telling people when and where the lynching would occur.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/05/opinion/sunday/southern-newspapers-justified-lynching.html

The Arkansas lynch mob that burned a black tenant farmer at the stake in 1921 observed common practice when it advertised the killing in advance so spectators could mark the grisly event on their calendars. The organizers notified newspapers early in the day that they planned to kill Henry Lowery as painfully as possible, giving editors time to produce special editions that provided the time, place and gruesome particulars of the death to come.​

 

[Aloha Hoosier]

good article from Jamelle Bouie

Neither the memorial nor the museum shies away from calling lynching what it was—“racial terror violence.” Terrorism is a loaded term, but Bryan Stevenson, whose nonprofit Equal Justice Initiative organized and built the memorial and the accompanying Legacy Museum, embraces it and its implications. “When a black person was lynched, they were not just lynching that person, they were targeting the entire African-American community,” said Stevenson. “Nobody thinks that the 9/11 perpetrators were just trying to kill only the people who worked at the World Trade Tower. They were trying to terrorize the rest of us, and that’s the reason why we felt justified in fighting a war. I look at the exodus of 6 million people who flee the American South during this period as victims of lynching, even though they weren’t strung up. And in that respect, you have to use the word terrorism to characterize this violence.”​

Clearly terrorism.

 

[iu_a_att]

Clearly terrorism.

clearly.

 

[Rockport Zebra]

We didn't kill enough of them

 

[DrHoops]

Especially when you see little children smiling with everyone else, knowing that the hatred is going to be passed down another generation...and on and on.

You are right...I find the images so deeply disturbing that I can't look at them. What traumas the lynchers inflicted on their victims and on everyone else in the community. Awful.