The Equal Justice Initiative has announced plans to con­struct a Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama to com­mem­o­rate the vic­tims of ter­ror lynch­ings in the American South. In a New Yorker pro­file of EJI exec­u­tive direc­tor Bryan Stevenson, Jeffrey Toobin describes EJI’s crim­i­nal defense work and the gen­e­sis of the lynch­ing memo­r­i­al. ​“There’s no ques­tion that we have a long his­to­ry of see­ing peo­ple through [a] lens of racial dif­fer­ence. It’s a direct line from slav­ery to the treat­ment of black sus­pects today, and we need to acknowl­edge the shame­ful­ness of that his­to­ry,” Stevenson says. ​“Our soci­ety applies a pre­sump­tion of dan­ger­ous­ness and guilt to young black men, and that’s what leads to wrong­ful arrests and wrong­ful con­vic­tions and wrong­ful death sen­tences.” EJI’s ground­break­ing book, Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror, has doc­u­ment­ed hun­dreds of pre­vi­ous­ly unac­knowl­edged lynch­ings across the South. Stevenson and oth­er schol­ars link the his­to­ry of lynch­ings to the use of the death penal­ty today. Professor Jordan Steiker of the University of Texas at Austin said, ​“In one sense, the death penal­ty is clear­ly a sub­sti­tute for lynch­ing. One of the main jus­ti­fi­ca­tions for the use of the death penal­ty, espe­cial­ly in the South, was that it served to avoid lynch­ing. The num­ber of peo­ple exe­cut­ed ris­es tremen­dous­ly at the end of the lynch­ing era. And there’s still incred­i­ble over­lap between places that had lynch­ing and places that con­tin­ue to use the death penal­ty.” The peace memo­r­i­al, which EJI hopes to open in in 2017, will con­tain a sus­pend­ed col­umn rep­re­sent­ing each U.S. coun­ty in which a lynch­ing has been doc­u­ment­ed. Volunteers have trav­eled across the American South col­lect­ing soil from each known lynch­ing site for inclu­sion in the memo­r­i­al. In addi­tion to the per­ma­nent columns, there will be a remove­able col­umn for each coun­ty, which EJI will encour­age local juris­dic­tions to return to their home coun­ties to dis­play as an acknowl­edg­ment of their his­to­ry. ​“We’re going to cre­ate a space where you can walk and spend time and go through that rep­re­sents these lynch­ings,” Stevenson said, ​“But, more than that, we’re going to chal­lenge every coun­ty in this coun­try where a lynch­ing took place to come and claim a memo­r­i­al piece — and to erect it in their county.”

(J. Toobin, ​“The Legacy of Lynching, On Death Row,” The New Yorker, August 15, 2016; EJI, ​“The Memorial to Peace and Justice.”) See Race.

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