This was the long-anticipated day of the Legacy Museum tour, also called the “Lynching Museum” in Montgomery, Alabama. A lot of grief today. The museum and the Legacy Memorial is hands down one of the most profound experiences I’ve ever had in any museum or monument. It left us gutted and tearful, both of which seem like an appropriate response the the extensive history of trauma it represents. No amount of reading and learning can prepare you for that. (And that’s me viewing it through a White person’s eyes). I think this is an essential experience. Perhaps we should clear the slate and have us all re-apply for citizenship, with visiting this memorial as a prerequisite.
I’m still reeling. I still cannot fathom … how can it be that I learned about international atrocities many years ago: the Holocaust at age 8, Hiroshima at age 10, the Killing Fields and Bosnia in my teens, an yet we as a national are so incapable of spending any collective energy to systematically teach the two genocides upon which our country was founded: the decimation of native cultures and the theft and enslavement of Black Africans and subsequent terrorization of Black Americans. How is it that I only learned about the Tulsa Massacre in 2020. And the history of lynchings really encompasses it all.
“Lynchings in America were not isolated hate crimes committed by rouge vigilantes. Lynchings were targeted racial violence perpetrated to uphold an unjust social order. Lynchings were terrorism.
This era left thousands dead; significantly marginalized black people politically, financially and socially and inflicted deep trauma on the entire African American community. White people who witnessed, participated in, and socialized their children in a culture that tolerated gruesome lynchings also were psychologically damaged. State officials’ tolerance of lynchings created enduring national and institutional wounds that have not yet healed. Lynchings occurred in communities where African Americans today remain marginalized, disproportionately poor, overrepresented in prisons and jails, and underrepresented in decision-making roles in the criminal justice system.” - Legacy Memorial
I will not say any more on this museum and memorial because you will have to go and see it for yourself. Thank you Bryan Stevenson and the Equal Justice Initiative for this gift.
One final thought. I am so grateful that this memorial honors the full brutal “legacy” of slavery through mass incarceration. I do not know exactly why incarceration struck a personal cord with me at the end of my medical training, but it has now increasingly become the focus of my practice of medicine. I believe watching people close to me being mistreated by this system during my impressionable years left its mark. But the more I get into this work, the more I believe it goes deeper than that. Mass incarceration is a modern evolution of slavery and segregation. And it is one of the most, if not the most, critical Civil Rights issue of our time. And hopefully this is changing, but it still seems like it is talked about as a fringe issue, as if it’s not a predictable outcome of our education and financial, policing, legislative and political agendas. One (HUGE) example is how Nixon’s “War on Drug”, which has shaped our modern criminal justice policy and lead to skyrocketing rates of incarceration of people of color, was a calculated assault on Black communities. In a 1994 interview, John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s domestic chief of staff, admitted that this policy was designed to target black communities:
“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and Black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or Black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and the Blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing them both heavily, we could disrupt these communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.” (Citation).
The last recorded “lynching” in the United States was of 19-year-old Michael Donald of Mobile, Alabama on March 21, 1981. And yet if lynching is defined as “to kill someone for an alleged offense with or without a legal trial,” can we really say it has stopped?
A lot of essential learning here:
DOCUMENTARIES:
“Thirteenth” - A must.
BOOKS:
Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow” - really the Bible of modern incarceration reform
Bryan Stevenson’s “Just Mercy” - founder of EJI, fierce advocate for death row inmates, reformer of criminal justice.
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