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Hannah Charlton takes a journey into America’s dark history of segregation and subjugation of black communities and wonders how Britain could do the same
It is pouring with rain. I’m standing outside the long, dark wall of a building in downtown Montgomery waiting to go through security, asking myself: why am I here? What right do I have to be here?
I’m in front of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Alabama. A visionary name for the first ever public commemoration for the victims of lynching and violent terror in the post-slavery period of American history when white supremacy forced black communities into subjugation and segregation: America’s greatest wound, as yet unhealed and never fully acknowledged.
I’m feeling a complicated mix of emotions. Anxiety, confusion and the anticipation of deep shame, and of somehow being held accountable. I didn’t yet know how to be here.
I had bought my ticket to both the memorial and its partner project the Legacy Museum across the road in a new, white building home to the Equality and Justice Initiative. $3.50 was the price for a day that would lead me deep into the divided heart of America. It would also force me to examine my own personal British collusion.
Later, I came to understand just how privileged my curiosity was. The curiosity that would take me through Selma and along the road to Montgomery that the Civil Rights marchers took to demand the right to vote. But I needed to turn the inquiry on myself.
Hanging Headstones
The first sight of the memorial is a long, low structure up on a slope, past a sculpture of enslaved people straining at their chains in terror.
Under the roof were row on serried row of steel coffin shapes, with just enough space to walk between. Each of these weathered steel caskets had etched into it the name of a county and below the names and death dates of those individuals brutally murdered during the years of violent terror.
Walking through this forest of hanging headstones was to be confronted with waves of tragic deaths – women and men, sisters, brothers and the more poignant Unknowns.
As I went lower through the memorial’s spiral structure, the steel headstones gradually rose above me becoming hanging pillars so that I was looking up at the foot of the headstone just as the lynching witnesses would have looked up to the body hanging from the tree. And I found myself mouthing each name listed – Charles Curtis, Hollis Riles, Cairo Williams, Hog Wilson, Bernice Raspberry, Smead Stith, Baillie Crutchfield – and perhaps in this way, recognising, infinitesimally, each victim.
I was surrounded by older white Americans, older African Americans, a group of Africans in their patterned dashikis. Everyone was quiet, absorbed in their own journey.
I was uncomfortably conscious of how the design of the headstones pulled me, the visitor, into the position of the white voyeurs encouraged to come and witness the event. It reinforced the calculated desire of the white mobs to show that they had the power to terrorise entire communities of colour. It also made me painfully aware of the profoundly different experiences we, the visitors, were sharing, close physically in this moment but significantly distant in our own histories.
Along the wall was a series of small cameo plaques, recording the reason given for an individual lynching. To the weight of the steel caskets above was now added the weight of the stories on the wall – each one a life brutally terminated for a slight, for slight infractions of white men’s rules, in force to humiliate black people: drinking from a white person’s well, marrying a black man, marrying a white woman.
Vicious Spirals
The man behind this huge initiative is Bryan Stevenson. A justice advocate, he has a bold vision of asking America to confront the true legacy of slavery and specifically of racial terror which he connects directly to today’s mass incarceration and excessive sentencing.
For Stevenson, there is a continuation of the same racist na