Equal Justice Initiative Memorial Highlights Links Between Lynching and Death Penalty

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.