National Memorial for Peace & Justice + Legacy Museum Now Open

National Memorial for Peace and Justice

Despite the fact that the US has a well documented history of nearly two and a half centuries of legalized enslavement (1640-1865/66), enshrined in the US  Constitution; nearly another century of legalized apartheid known as Jim Crow (1876-1960-1980s?) and multiple de facto forms of explicitly racialized and class segregation (continuing today); and centuries of racist terror and enforced white supremacist terror, policing, brutality, and violence against peoples of African descent (as well as Native Americans and other non-white peoples), there have been relatively few national or regional museums or monuments recognizing this terrible history.

The aftermath of a lynching

Across the US there (rightly) museums calling attention to the horrific Nazi Holocaust against Jewish people that occurred in Germany and across much of Europe from the 1930s through 1945. There are specific museums and commemoration cites honoring specific African American figures, regional events, and particular moments, like Civil Rights history. Yet until very recently, there were only a few general museums specifically recognizing African American history and culture, and almost none calling attention to the horrendous legacy of slavery, segregation and racialized terror, all of which have contributed in numerous ways to shaping the society in which all Americans live today.

A sculpture commemorating
the brutal history of chattel slavery

Thankfully, Americans and people from all over the globe are flocking to the architecturally stunning National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) in Washington, which provides an exceptionally thorough overview and celebration of the richness of African American and Black life in the United States and North America. (I wrote about visiting the NMAAHC last February.) To the NMAAHC, as of a week ago you can also now visit a museum that acknowledges the legacy of lynching, one of the most horrific manifestations of racialized terror in American history, as well as chattel slavery and its many afterlives, which include the carceral state. The Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration, and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, both projects of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), opened in Montgomery, Alabama 2 weeks ago on April 26, 2018. According to its website,

The Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration is situated on a site in Montgomery where enslaved people were once warehoused. A block from one of the most prominent slave auction spaces in America, the Legacy Museum is steps away from an Alabama dock and rail station where tens of thousands of black people were trafficked during the 19th century....

The 11,000-square-foot museum is built on the site of a former warehouse where enslaved black people were imprisoned, and is located midway between an historic slave market and the main river dock and train station where tens of thousands of enslaved people were trafficked during the height of the domestic slave trade. Montgomery's proximity to the fertile Black Belt region, where slave-owners amassed large enslaved populations to work the rich soil, elevated Montgomery's prominence in domestic trafficking, and by 1860, Montgomery was the capital of the domestic slave trade in Alabama, one of the two largest slave-owning states in America.

and

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which opened to the public on April 26, 2018, is the nation’s 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.

Work on the memorial began in 2010 when EJI staff began investigating thousands of racial terror lynchings in the American South, many of which had never been documented. EJI was interested not only in lynching incidents, but in understanding the terror and trauma this sanctioned violence against the black community created. Six million black people fled the South as refugees and exiles as a result of these "racial terror lynchings."

This research ultimately produced Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror in 2015 which documented thousands of racial terror lynchings in twelve states. Since the report’s release, EJI has supplemented its original research by documenting racial terror lynchings in states outside the Deep South. EJI staff have also embarked on a project to memorialize this history by visiting hundreds of lynching sites, collecting soil, and erecting public markers, in an effort to reshape the cultural landscape with monuments and memorials that more truthfully and accurately reflect our history.

African Americans re-enslaved
through convict leasing

The Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), established by public interest lawyer, author and MacArthur Foundation "genius" award-winner Bryan Stevenson in 1989, was long known for its impressive work providing legal aid to innocent death row prisoners and successfully exonerating a number of them, as well as its manifold efforts on behalf of economically and socially marginalized communities across the US. As Stevenson looked at the history of the US prison-industrial complex, the school-to-prison pipeline and unequal applications of justice that African Americans faced, and the larger, profoundly skewed narrative about race in the US, he realized that one component of maintaining the structures and systems that allowed this narrative to take root was the absence of public recognition of the history that had helped to create it and the structures of oppression now in place, and one key element was the occluded history of US lynching, which usually went unpunished by federal or state authorities--and in the case of the latter, often had their complicity or tacit acquiescence--and which helped to support and further white supremacy and inequality.

Newly freed African Americans
in the post-Civil War era

Moreover, the absence of public museums and venues commemorating this history have helped in allowing narratives of white and national innocence to take hold; what the public doesn't know cannot exist, right? Out of site, out of mind. It only happened down there or far away, etc. Slavery ended and that was the end of it, right? Furthering this, the absence and silencing of the names of the more than 4,000 lynched, of their stories and voices, their families' and communities' traumas, except in specific works of art (films, photographic exhibits, works of fiction and nonfiction, etc.), has allowed the horror to become abstracted and thus, to a certain degree, ignored and dismissed. And yet, it waters the very soil and sand on which every American treads, much as the dispossession, forced removals and slaughter of Native Americans, to name but another frequently obscured component of US history does as well.

Stevenson and a group of fellow lawyers spent years delving into this history, combing through archives to notate names and stories of lynchings across the South, and documented roughly 4,400 across the South (though there were lynchings all over the US, including in the North and West), from 1877 to 1950, which are featured at the Memorial site. As a result, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice redresses this long silencing and invisibility; its architecturally striking building housing the tribute to those who were lynched and the site on which it sits have drawn considerable praise. The latter venue was inspired by the unforgettably powerful Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, and by the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg. To quote The New York Times's Campbell Robertson

At the center is a grim cloister, a walkway with 800 weathered steel columns, all hanging from a roof. Etched on each column is the name of an American county and the people who were lynched there, most listed by name, many simply as “unknown.” The columns meet you first at eye level, like the headstones that lynching victims were rarely given. But as you walk, the floor steadily descends; by the end, the columns are all dangling above, leaving you in the position of the callous spectators in old photographs of public lynchings.

The magnitude of the killing is harrowing, all the more so when paired with the circumstances of individual lynchings, some described in brief summaries along the walk: Parks Banks, lynched in Mississippi in 1922 for carrying a photograph of a white woman; Caleb Gadly, hanged in Kentucky in 1894 for “walking behind the wife of his white employer”; Mary Turner, who after denouncing her husband’s lynching by a rampaging white mob, was hung upside down, burned and then sliced open so that her unborn child fell to the ground.

At the second site, the Legacy Museum makes the connection between the slavery and apartheid past and the present prison system, showing how the past evolved into a system that continues to wreak havoc on countless Black and brown lives. As the Times article notes, the Museum guides the visitor through the compelling argument that Stevenson have made for how this system is still operating, ending on the hopeful note encouraging voter registration and political activism. Like the NMAAHC, where I witnessed groups of students eagerly queuing up to visit, the Legacy Museum and National Memorial for Peace and Justice should be obligatory sites for American school children to spend time and study. Given the current state of our politics and society, the US can only benefit as a result.


The Guardian interviews museum founder Bryan Stevenson:

Quote: Ibram X. Kendi

"Hate and ignorance have not driven the history of racist ideas in America. Racist policies have driven the history of racist ideas in America. And this fact becomes apparent when we examine the causes behind, not the consumption of racist ideas, but the production of racist ideas. What caused US senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina in 1837 to produce the racist idea of slavery as a positive good, when he knew slavery's torturous horrors? What caused Atlanta newspaper editor Henry W. Grady in 1885 to produce the racist idea of "separate but equal," when he knew southern communities were hardly separate or equal? What caused think tankers after the presidential election of Barack Obama in 2008 to produce the racist idea of postracial society, when they knew all those studies had documented discrimination? Time and again, racist ideas have not been cooked up from the boiling pot of ignorance and hate. Time and again, powerful and brilliant men and women have produced racist ideas in order to justify the racist policies of their era, in order to redirect the blame for their era's racial disparities away from those policies and onto Black people.

"I was taught the popular folktale of racism: that ignorant and hateful people had produced racist ideas, and that these racist people had instituted racist policies. But when I learned the motives behind the production of many of America's most influentially racist ideas, it became quite obvious that this folktale, though sensible, was not based on a firm footing of historical evidence. Ignorance/hate-->racist ideas-->discrimination: this causal relationship is largely ahistorical. It has actually been the inverse relationship--racial discrimination led to racist ideas which led to ignorance and hate. Racial discrimination-->racist ideas-->ignorance/hate: this is the causal relationship driving America's history of race relations."

-- Ibram X. Kendi, from "Prologue," in Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, New York: Nation Books, 2016. (This book received the 2016 National Book Award for Nonfiction.)

Paul Beatty Wins Man Booker Prize

(Photo by John Phillips/Pool photo via AP)

Congratulations to Paul Beatty, winner of the 2016 Man Booker Prize, for his novel The Sellout! Paul is the first Americanever to receive this prize, which the Booker Prize organization opened up in 2014 to all novelists writing in English, and is the second black writer in a row to receive the award, after Marlon James, who received it for his volume A Brief History of Seven Killings, and the third over all, with Ben Okri, the first black writer to receive the Booker back in 1991 for The Famished Road. Paul's novel is a hard-hitting, sometimes harsh satire about the United States, American history, slavery, segregation, and racism, and hardly relents from its blistering opening pages to its conclusion. 

I first met Paul over 25 years ago when he was among the initial readers at the Dark Room Writers Collective. He had just published his first book of poems, Big Bank Take Little Bank, and had recently won the Nuyorican Poets Cafe poetry slam. Each of the poems in that has narrative force, but it wasn't until Paul published his acclaimed novel White Boy Shuffle (1996) that the world, I included, realized he was not only a poet of originality and talent but a fiction writer to reckon with. He has since published another volume of poetry, Joker Joker Deuce (1994), as well as two more novels, Tuff  (2000) and Slumberland (2008), and as befits a master of satire, he edited Hokum: An Anthology of African-American Humor, in 2006. 

Congratulations again to Paul, and a hat tip to the Man Booker Prize jury for its excellent and unanimous decision!

Fourth of July Poem: Jay Wright

Jay Wright at Rutgers-
New Brunswick, 2006

In place of a prose post about the Fourth of July, I thought I'd cede the space to a poet: Jay Wright (1935-). My very first post on this blog, 11 years ago, was a tribute to him when he received the Bollingen Prize, and I often think that I should post his poetry more, and occasionally have done so, but the ones I want to post tend to be quite long. 

Here's a poem from his début book, The Homecoming Singer (Corinth, 1971), which was reprinted in Transfigurations (LSU Press, 2000), a volume that should have received the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, National Book Critics' Circle Award, and every other major poetic honor. History will, I hope, be the ultimate judge in favor of his greatness; the poems are the testimony. 

"Crispus Attucks" is Wright's meditation on the Revolutionary War hero, who the first person to die in this country's first, decisive battle for freedom. A few years ago, while conducting research for a novel, I came across John Adams's dismissive description of Attucks, which was part of his trial defense of the British soldiers who killed the patriots during the Boston Massacre. 

Twenty years before, as that post also reveals, Attucks had run away from his master in Framingham; clearly freedom was on his mind, or as Wright calls it, the prelude to his "impulsive miracle." This was also his personal and mortal sacrifice, which helped this country to achieve the liberty it trumpets to the entire world. Too often, as Wright makes clear, we forget its first architect. Let's honor him today.

Crispus Attucks

CRISPUS ATTUCKS

When we speak

of those musket-draped

and manqué Englishman;

that cloistered country;

all those common people,

dotting the potted stoves,

hating the king,

shifting uneasily under

the sharp sails

of the unwelcome boats,

sometimes we forget you.

Who asked you

for that impulsive miracle?

I form it now,

with my own motives.

The flag dipping in your hands,

your crafted boots

hammering up the unclaimed streets,

all that was in that unformed moment.

But it wasn't the feel of those things,

nor the burden of the American character;

it was somehow the sense

of an unencumbered escape,

the breaking of a Protestant host,

the ambiguous, detached

judgment of yourself.

Now, we think of you,

when, through the sibilant streets,

another season drums

your intense, communal daring.

Copyright © Jay Wright, 1971, 2000. From Transfigurations: Collected Poems, Louisiana University Press, 2000. All rights reserved.

New York Times' "Unpublished Black History"

A young Ferdinand Lewis Alcindor, Jr., high school
basketball star at Power Memorial Catholic during
the Catholic High School Athletic Association Championship, in 1965, 6 years before he became
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (Don Hogan Charles)

I have been checking the New York Times every day to see what photographs and stories will be featured as part of its "Unpublished Black History" series, which it debuted this year for Black History Month. In essence, it is a catalogue of material, often newsworthy in some way, that nevertheless failed to make it into the paper. In some cases, the Times editors approach candor about why they did not publish the images or stories, but in other cases, some quite fascinating, they do not.

It's hard to know, lacking documentation of some sort (notes, audiotaped material, etc.) or the direct comments of the editors, writers and photographers themselves, why some of these key moments were passed over, but it also underlines the fact that even today, and not just with Black History, editorial choices of various kinds shape what makes it into the mainstream news and what gets complete passed over. As I view the photographs and read the brief entries, I keep wondering, what led to this story being skipped and others receiving coverage? This would be a great subject for the Times to devote one of its roundtables to.

A few images from the series, which you can find here (in reserve chronological order, going back to February 1):

Run-DMC performing at Madison Square Garden
in 1986 for an anti-crack benefit (Chester Higgins, Jr.)

Several photos (one by Allyn Baum at left) from the
unpublished Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. trove

Scholar Kenneth B. Clark at home in 1969, with his wife
and family, in Hastings-on-Hudson (Eddie Hauser)

Martina Arroyo, in 1965, during her run
in Verdi's Don Carlo (Sam Falk)

Some of the many photos, taken in 1972 by
Jack Manning, of James Baldwin;
only one of which ended up in the New York Times 

Protesters confronting police during
a 1964 march in Jackson, Mississippi, in
response to the assassination of civil rights
leader Medgar Evers (Claude Sitton)