On February 1, 1893, a crowd estimated as at least 5,000 strong gathered at a train station in Texarkana, Arkansas to capture Henry Smith, a 17 year-old black handyman accused of murdering a three year-old white girl in Paris, Texas. Perhaps "capture" is the wrong word here. Law enforcement had already captured Smith; the crowd was looking to take possession of him and kill him, their minds already made up about the girl's death without really understanding any facts of the case.
Faced with an angry mob representing overwhelming odds, the police guarding Smith handed him over, although he begged the officers to just shoot him rather than release him to the mob. The crowd took Smith and placed him in a cart, which they dragged through town to a custom-built scaffold erected specifically for his execution. They tied him to a stake and burned his body with hot irons, including gouging his eyes out and shoving a hot iron rod down his throat. They then (with Smith still alive) poured kerosene over his body and set the scaffold ablaze. At this point the crowd was significantly larger than 5,000, with some estimates putting the number of spectators cheering the events of that night at 15,000.
I believe travel is valuable because it brings you face to face with experiences and histories that you normally wouldn't encounter. That's not the only reason I travel but it's a big part of it. And sure, it's a lot more fun searching for wildlife in Africa or exploring ancient ruins in Mexico or South America or watching and playing sports in England and France or exploring food the world over than it is learning about the history of lynching in the United States. But sometimes the destinations and the subjects of those trips choose you.
If you had asked me six months ago to describe a typical lynching (I know...why would you ask me that but just go with this for a minute), I would have described it as a few white men (let's say two to four total) kidnapping a black man under cover of darkness and accused of some bogus crime and taking him to an isolated spot in the woods where there was no chance of anybody witnessing the murder. The murder, by the way, would always be a hanging. And the isolated spot would be involved so that by the time the body was found, there would be no chance of the lynchers being caught.
I now know that I am right. And that I am way wrong.
Lynching is one of the most disgusting parts of the history of the United States. It is exactly what I thought it was six months ago and it is way more brutal. I never would have conceived of a lynching like Henry Smith went through. Couldn't imagine. The sad part is Smith's lynching was short. He was tortured for just 50 minutes before he was killed. Others weren't so lucky. Some torturings were much more lengthy.
Shootings. Being burned alive. Hangings. Beatings. Torture. Castration. In darkness. In daylight. By one or two men alone. By gangs of people including men, women and boys. With spectators. With photographers to sell postcards as souvenirs (sometimes body parts of the lynched people were sold as souvenirs also). And the targets of the lynching? Could be one man. Could be a group of men. Could be a woman or women. Could be children. Could be whole families, including babies. Could be anyone of dark complexion accused rightfully or wrongfully of any slight or crime or breaking of societal norms including not showing sufficient respect for any white person they encountered. I'm sure the words in this paragraph don't cover everything. Are you feeling sick yet?
The reckoning of America's lynching history has long been ignored. Go to the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama and you won't be able to ignore it any more.
According to their website, the Equal Justice Initiative (or EJI) has successfully altered 135 wrongful convictions for inmates on death row in Alabama. The EJI has also successfully argued in some cases all the way to the United States Supreme Court for changes in the treatment and rights of prisoners suffering from dementia and life without parole sentences for children under the age of 18. If Stevenson's name rings a bell, maybe it's because Michael B. Jordan played him alongside Jamie Foxx as Walter McMillian in the movie Just Cause. McMillian was one of the first overturned convictions secured by Stevenson and the EJI.
Three years ago, the EJI opened two new cultural institutes: the Legacy Museum, an exhibit space centered around the principle that slavery and segregation has led to an historic imbalance in attitudes toward the guilt of black people in society reflected in disproportionate levels of incarceration, and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which is probably best described as a lynching memorial.
Strange though it may sound, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice was one of the first sites we put on our list when we contemplated a trip to the American South. Yes, we picked Montgomery, without really understanding what else there was to do there or around there, because there was a memorial to people who were lynched. I know, not a fun getaway destination attraction. This trip was about putting something other than fun first.
The Legacy Museum is a must see in downtown Montgomery. It addresses the issue of slavery translating to segregation and then to the creation of two distinct Americas - one white and one not white - through a fundamentally different lens than museums like the National Civil Rights Museum. It's not an accident. The focus is different. While both museums might start at the same point in time with the Middle Passage of the slave trade, their end points are not the same and their addressing truths about the role of race in our society is handled with a different narrative. Neither is wrong. They are telling a story which looks similar but ultimately is not.
There were two parts of the Legacy Museum that hit me hard, likely because even though we had toured sites and museums that talked about horrors of slavery and segregation, the Legacy Museum presented us with new information. The first of these was an interactive map of the southern portion of the United States, telling the story of more than 4,000 separate lynchings that had been uncovered by the EJI. Click on your state and then your county and you can find out who was lynched where and when. We live in Arlington County, Virginia and there are plenty of lynching sites in our state. It brought us no comfort to find that there were none documented in our county.
The second exhibit was a video of the EJI's work to improve conditions for inmates at St. Clair Correctional Facility in the county of the same name in Alabama. St. Clair is a maximum security, state penitentiary with a deserved reputation as one of the most violent, overcrowded and understaffed prisons in the United States. Honestly, it sounds like a free-for-all, where guards have abdicated responsibility for maintaining law and order in favor of allowing inmates to participate in a kind of survival of the fittest sort of exercise. Murders, shankings and inmates assigned way above their crime level on a temporary basis combined with guards providing some inmates with knives can't be what anyone in responsible charge of anything intended. Good for EJI here for trying to make a difference. The fact that someone has been convicted of a crime doesn't mean they deserve this kind of living environment, and that's assuming the conviction is the right verdict in the first place.
There is plenty to get upset about in the Legacy Museum. But the National Memorial for Peace and Justice is a complete gut punch.
The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, unlike the Legacy Museum, is not located in downtown Montgomery, but instead maybe three quarters of a mile outside of town to the south on a bit of a hill. Truth be told, Montgomery is just not that big a city but the outside of town-ness is noticeable when heading to the Memorial. It removes all context when you enter the Memorial.
Like most monuments or memorials, the concept behind the National Memorial for Peace and Justice is fairly simple. There's a winding path leading up a hill (albeit past a sculpture depicting a group of African men and women chained like animals and ready for sale, which is chilling) to a structure that appears square or C-shaped in plan with a series of rectangular boxes hanging from beneath the roof.
As you move closer to the Memorial, the boxes start to become more defined. They are what they appeared to be from afar: simple rectangular prisms maybe about six feet or more high and maybe 18" by 30" in the other two dimensions. They are made from COR-TEN steel that has rusted to the trademark burnt orange of that material. And there are words punched into one side of the boxes. At the top of each box is a county and state name; below that there are names of people, each with a date below the name.
There is actually one box for every county in every southern state where the EJI has confirmed a lynching has taken place. The names and dates on the boxes are the names of victims and the dates they were lynched. The simplicity of that gesture of displaying the names of those who were unjustly murdered is powerful. It forces all of us to bear witness to the crimes committed and for those people to never be forgotten. There are more names than you can possibly read as you start walking through the field of COR-TEN pillars. The numbers hit you.
By the time you make the second turn, you are maybe nine or ten feet below where you started and faced with a field of hanging boxes above you and all around you. The transformation is complete. The etched boxes which you started walking among on a equal footing are now completely suspended. They are now removed from you, you easily understand that these might be people and not just boxes.
As you make the walk down towards the third and final turn, there are accounts of lynchings on the walls on either side of you. William Stephens and Jefferson Cole lynched in Texas for refusing to abandon their land to white people. Caleb Gadly lynched in Kentucky for walking behind the wife of his white boss. Jack Brownlee lynched in Alabama for having a man arrested for attempting to assault his daughter. Warren Powell, aged 14, lynched in Georgia for frightening a white girl. Bud Spears lynched in Mississippi for protesting the lynching of another man. Jim Eastman lynched in Tennessee for not allowing a white man to beat him in a fight.
None of that is about finding a punishment to fit a crime, and not just because there are no crimes committed by the murdered parties in the paragraph above. It's all done to let black people know their place in society. And that's most of what all lynching was about anyway.
The feeling I got from the Memorial was one of tacit confrontation. It's in your face because it's right there. There's no ignoring that these murders happened everywhere. It's factual and non-emotional while at the same time being a completely emotional and visceral experience. It's shameful to those people who look like me. Or at least it ought to be. Even if I (as an immigrant to this country in 1979) nor any of my ancestors had anything to do with these lynchings directly.
We attempted to find some counties in Virginia near to where we live and unfortunately there were some. There are documented lynchings in Loudoun County, which is less than 20 miles away from where we live. We found Loudoun County's COR-TEN box during a walk through the courtyard after our tour of the interior (meaning under the roof) portion of the Memorial. There are three names on it, which is three too many.
If you ever visit the Memorial and can't find your county or one near to you, don't worry. There are replica versions of all the hanging boxes laid down like coffins and organized by state along the exit walkway. There's plenty of time to read each and every name in each and every county where these crimes have occurred. It came as no surprise to us that the county where we were at the time, Montgomery County, Alabama, had a very long list of names.
I think there's a delicate balance to sites like this. There has to be enough information to get the point across but not too much that there becomes too much horror which would make you either terminate your experience early or end up just tuning out. I think the Memorial gets this balance right. It's not a complicated memorial but it gets its point across very effectively. There's an art to getting this stuff right.
Two years after opening the Legacy Museum and the Memorial for Peace and Justice, EJI opened a new Legacy Pavilion just slightly north of downtown Montgomery. There's a cafeteria and some other memorials out there. We made a point to stop by there so we'd have the complete EJI experience but neither the Pavilion nor the Museum match the straightforward power of the Memorial, although I wouldn't even think about skipping the Museum. It's a perfect precursor from a content and background point of view to a visit to the Memorial.
This is the last post I'm writing about racial inequality based on our trip to Memphis, Mississippi, Little Rock and Alabama this May. These have been difficult posts to write. There's not a lot of fun and joy in them. There's not even any justice in a site like the Memorial for Peace and Justice, despite its name. In my view, it's there to remind us not to forget and to memorialize those who did nothing really to deserve the fate that they received.
I don't really know what else to say here or how to close this one. I will say in many ways Montgomery was a completely normal and nice and livable small city. They have museums and monuments and great restaurants in an historic downtown. But it's got this history that is so despicable from the day it was founded all the way to today. The Legacy Museum is located in a former warehouse on a site where slaves used to be held for auction and there are signs in town noting Montgomery's place in the slave trade right next to a fountain that stands where the auctions used to take place. It has to be rough for anyone living and working there to get past that. Or maybe you get used to it, I don't really know. I don't think I could. There's probably no return trip to Montgomery in my future (although I have said that about places before and have gone back) and I know it wasn't a fun destination but the Memorial for Peace and Justice did turn out to be just what we expected, and that was a good thing here.
How We Did It
The Legacy Museum and Memorial for Peace and Justice are both open Wednesday through Sunday. We needed timed tickets in advance before visiting either site, although that may have been pandemic-related. The tickets were free with a donation option (we did donate). The Legacy Pavilion keeps the same hours as the Museum and Memorial. We had some good food out there. Get the deep fried pork chop and avoid over-eating. There is a shuttle bus which operates between all three sites, although we believe it was not working this past May that we visited.
We allocated a full day to the experience of visiting all three EJI buildings, We started at 9 a.m. and it took us about four to five hours or so to get through all three sites. We definitely didn't need all day even though I think we covered all three sites in a fairly comprehensive manner with our 1 p.m. finish. The trip to these few sites is definitely worth it. There were few sites in the South that moved us in the way these three did.
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