From Slavery to the Death Penalty: New Museum and Memorial for Peace and Justice Open in Montgomery, Alabama

On April 26, 2018, the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) opened the Memorial for Peace and Justice and its accom­pa­ny­ing Legacy Museum, which tell the sto­ries of the more than 4,000 men, women, and chil­dren killed by racial ter­ror lynch­ings in the cen­tu­ry fol­low­ing the Civil War, and trace the con­nec­tions between slav­ery, seg­re­ga­tion, cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment, and mass incar­cer­a­tion. The open­ing drew thou­sands of vis­i­tors from across the coun­try, the­atri­cal head­lin­ers, and a host of civ­il rights leg­ends — includ­ing Congressman John Lewis and the sur­viv­ing plain­tiffs and lawyer who brought the law­suit that end­ed seg­re­gat­ed seat­ing on public buses. 

The memo­r­i­al and muse­um arose out of the crim­i­nal defense work of the Equal Justice Initiative and its founder, Bryan Stevenson, first rep­re­sent­ing indi­gent pris­on­ers on Alabama’s death row and lat­er expand­ing to fight juve­nile life sen­tences and oth­er man­i­fes­ta­tions of mass incar­cer­a­tion. Stevenson said, ​“It real­ly springs from that expe­ri­ence of rep­re­sent­ing peo­ple in courts and begin­ning to see the lim­its of how com­mit­ted our courts are to erad­i­cat­ing dis­crim­i­na­tion and bias. I want to get to the point where we expe­ri­ence some­thing more like free­dom. … I don’t think we are going to get there until we cre­ate a new con­scious­ness about our history.” 

EJI’s research on lynch­ings, includ­ing the 2015 report, Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror, shows a clear link between lynch­ings and the death penal­ty. Counties and regions that today car­ry out the most exe­cu­tions are the same places in which lynch­ings were most like­ly to take place, and the ongo­ing racial bias in the appli­ca­tion of the death penal­ty reflects the lega­cy of racial terror lynchings. 

“[I] believe that cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment is the stepchild of lynch­ing,” Stevenson said. ​“It was dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly used against peo­ple of col­or; it still con­tin­ues to be shaped pri­mar­i­ly by race.” As America’s glob­al allies pres­sured the coun­try to end lynch­ings after World War II, Stevens said, ​“lynch­ings moved inside. We still exe­cut­ed most­ly black peo­ple after pro­ceed­ings that were unre­li­able and unfair. We promised ​‘swift jus­tice,’ which was intend­ed to be the same thing as lynch­ing with­out the spec­ta­cle, with­out the optic, with­out the mob.” 

Stevenson said he was moti­vat­ed to cre­ate the memo­r­i­al and muse­um because a dis­cus­sion of the past is nec­es­sary to cre­ate a more just and equal soci­ety. ​“We haven’t cre­at­ed spaces in this coun­try that tell the his­to­ry of racial inequal­i­ty, of slav­ery, of lynch­ing, of seg­re­ga­tion that moti­vate peo­ple to say, ​‘Never again,’” he said.