Bryan Stevenson is an attorney who has fought against racial disparities in the justice system, and is the executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), a non-profit organization fighting against mass incarceration, the jailing of children, and the death penalty.
Mr. Stevenson, through the EJI, has created The Memorial to Peace and Justice, which will include a national memorial to lynching:
Racial terrorism forced millions of black people to flee the South during the first half of the 20th century and played a major role in shaping the demographic geography of America by creating large black populations in urban communities in the North and West.
The national memorial to lynching victims will be one of the nation's most ambitious projects relating to the history of racial terror lynchings. EJI has purchased six acres of land atop a rise that overlooks the City of Montgomery and out to the American South, where terror lynchings were most prevalent.
The memorial is constructed of hundreds of floating columns on which the names of lynching victims from over 800 counties across the United States will be inscribed.
One of the painful lessons of the Shoah (Holocaust) for Jews, is that people (both individuals and whole societies) will actively try to forget their own terrible history, and in doing so, try to erase communal responsibility, and the legacy of hatred that persists to this day. To resist this, we must instead insist on remembering:
Who were the "six million" murdered in the Holocaust? The number is so large it is almost impossible to comprehend. It does not convey who they were, where they lived, information about their families, what their dreams were, how they died, or whether and how they were related to us.
The Jews are a people of memory. Our history is an integral part of us and we pass it from generation to generation. Each year we tell the story of Passover–the exodus from Egypt–and recall the revelation at Mount Sinai. In the Yizkor prayer recited on the Jewish holidays we remember the collective tragedies of our people as well as our own personal losses. Every year we commemorate the yahrzeits (anniversaries) of deceased relatives.
Millions of our brethren were murdered without a trace during the Shoah. It is incumbent upon us to remember them. If we do not take action, their legacies will be lost to us forever. Since 1955, Yad Vashem has been fulfilling its mandate to preserve the memory of Holocaust victims by collecting their names, the ultimate representation of a person’s identity, as it is written: "And to them will I give in my house and within my walls a memorial and a name (Yad Vashem), an everlasting name that shall not be cut off." (Isaiah 56 : 5)
The genocide of Africans held in bondage, upon which the United States was built (much as the nation was founded upon the genocide of Native Americans), is something many white Americans have actively worked to erase from our collective memory, a white-washing of our history. This deliberate amnesia has brought us to a place where white supremacists occupy the White House, and naked bigotry has been normalized in every white community across the country (for more on this, see my diaries: Nazis in full daylight. No one should be surprised where conservatism and the GOP have brought us.; White privilege and white entitlement give rise to white supremacy, whether we recognize it or not.; White privilege and white entitlement give rise to white supremacy— Whiteness as Property.).
As Mr. Stevenson observes so eloquently, in this interview with Alice Speri in The Intercept, this deliberate amnesia permits the atrocities of the past to continue in different forms to this day:
Your efforts to set up markers of lynchings and other sites of racial violence, for instance by commemorating a major slave market in Montgomery, were sometimes met with fierce resistance by local leaders. Are they actually denying that this history is real?
They are denying it. They are saying, “Slavery was wonderful for black people. The Civil War was about state rights. Black people were treated well during enslavement. Lynching was just tough justice; they were all criminals who deserved lethal punishment. Black people were better off in segregated schools; we just all wanted to be in our own place.” This process of truth telling will push some people to try to deny it. And if there’s not complete denial, there’s certainly no shame. You’d be hard pressed to find anything that looks like a public expression of shame about slavery, or lynching, or segregation.
When we present the history, people have a hard time saying it didn’t happen, they just say we shouldn’t talk about it. When we tried to put up markers in downtown Montgomery, local historical officials said it would be “too controversial” to put up markers that talk about slavery. They didn’t say that didn’t happen, they just said it would be controversial, it would be unsettling, it would be uncomfortable for people to be reminded of slavery even though we have 59 markers and monuments to the Confederacy in the same space. (emphasis added)
Such white-washing of the true racial history of the US even finds it’s way into the calls of self-described progressives, who advocate ‘moving past identity politics’, and focusing on ‘economic justice’:
It’s not sufficient to talk about the unique challenges of white working class people. Whatever their problems are, they are the same problems that black working class people have, and brown working class people have, and black and brown people are also burdened with a presumption of dangerousness and guilt and a network of other issues. When you have 90 percent of the power and status and it drops to 85 percent, you can use your 85 percent of power and status to complain a lot about the 5 percent you lost, but when you have 5 percent of the status and power and you lose three percent you only have two percent to complain. So there is a disproportionate ability to make your loss, your problems, your struggles seem like the most important struggle, because you have so much more power and status. I am skeptical about this idea that somehow we have done too much to address the challenges of people of color, address the challenges of immigrants, and the challenges of the poor. I just don’t find much evidence of that.
In an interview with Ezra Klein for Vox, Stevenson exposes how the entire economic system of America was built on ethnic cleansing, and slave labor. No complete understanding of the disparities of our economic system today is possible without accounting for this history:
Ezra Klein
You often say that “the opposite of poverty is not wealth. The opposite of poverty is justice.” What do you mean by that?
Bryan Stevenson
The wealth of the colonies was built on genocide of removing Native Americans from lands that they occupied. We kept their names, but we made them leave. We didn’t really acknowledge the injustice of that because we were persuaded that our economic security and our political development require the acquisition of these lands. It began this way of thinking about wealth that is disconnected from the oppression that is sometimes used to create that wealth. And that habit was reinforced through slavery.
We created great wealth in new territories in the south and the colonies by relying on enslaved people and the labor and the benefits that that created without any real thinking about how that wealth was sustained by abuse and oppression and inequality and injustice.
This idea has emerged in America that wealth is created by people with great talent and great ability. We value wealth. We respect wealth. We admire wealth. We disdain the poor. We blame the poor. We fault the poor for not achieving more economic security.
For me, it's important to redefine what it is we are dealing with when we deal with poverty, and that definition begins with recognizing that the opposite of poverty isn't wealth. The opposite of poverty is justice. If we actually had been just to those communities that we removed from the land, if we had been just to the formally enslaved, if we'd been just to immigrants who came and gave great wealth, we would actually be in a very different place when it comes to dealing with structural poverty.
Ultimately, the reckoning with our past requires us to see the basic elements of white supremacy pervade every aspect of our culture, our institutions, our economy:
The true evil of American slavery was the narrative we created to justify it. They made up this ideology of white supremacy that cannot be reconciled with our Constitution, that cannot be reconciled with a commitment to fair and just treatment of all people. They made it up so they could feel comfortable while enslaving other people.
I really believe that narrative was the true evil, and it's the thing that didn't get abolished in 1865. If you read the 13th Amendment, it talks about ending involuntary servitude and forced labor, but it doesn't say anything about the narrative of racial difference, the ideology of white supremacy. Because of that, I've argued that slavery didn't end in 1865; it just evolved. We had decades of terrorism and violence and lynching. The North won the Civil War, but the South won the narrative war. There was no actual accountability. There was no reckoning. There was no acknowledgment that slavery was wrong at some fundamental level.
The failure of that transition means that even today, we're dealing with a narrative of racial difference. My work is aimed at trying to confront the burdens that people of color in this country face, which are heavily organized around presumption of dangerousness and guilt. It doesn't matter how educated you are, it doesn't matter how many degrees you have — you will go places in this country if you're a person of color and you will be presumed dangerous or guilty, and you're going to have to overcome that presumption. (emphasis added)
That the basic narrative of white supremacy persists at the core of our national identity is reflected in who we choose to commemorate:
What we do in the memorial spaces says a lot about who we are. The American South is littered with the iconography of the Confederacy. We are celebrating the architects and defenders of slavery. I don't think we understand what that means for our commitment to equality and fairness and justice.
If there were Hitler statutes all over Germany, I couldn't go there. I just couldn't. I would not able to make peace with the nation that was still comfortable with the era of German history where Nazis were responsible for the death of millions of Jewish people in concentration camps. But if you go to Berlin, the Holocaust memorial is extraordinary. You can barely go a hundred feet without seeing a monument that's been placed at the home of a Jewish family that was abducted.
In Rwanda, you are required to hear about the genocide. You can't go to Rwanda and spend a few days without someone talking to you about the damage and despair and the hurt and the pain created by that horror. In the genocide museum there, there are actually human skulls; that's how powerfully people want to express their grief. In South Africa, you are required to see the consequences of apartheid. There are places where camps and prisons have been turned into visiting sites where people can reflect on that legacy.
In this country, we don't talk about slavery. We don't talk about lynching. Worse, we've created the counternarrative that says we have nothing about which we should be ashamed. Our past is romantic and glorious. In my state of Alabama, Jefferson Davis's birthday is a state holiday. Confederate Memorial Day is a state holiday. We don't even have Martin Luther King Day in Alabama. We have Martin Luther King/Robert E. Lee Day.
Our two largest high schools are Robert E. Lee High and Jefferson Davis High. They're both 90-some percent African-American. If we don't think it matters, then I think we're just kidding ourselves. We do think it matters; that's why we have a 9/11 memorial. What we haven't done is understand what we are saying about who we are.
I think we have to increase our shame — and I don't think shame is a bad thing. I worked with people in jails and prisons, and most parole boards will make my clients say, “I am sorry,” before they can get parole. It's a requirement in many states that you have to show remorse, even if you have a perfect prison record, before they will let you out. (emphasis added)
Stevenson makes what I believe is a crucial point in the the preceding statement, a point which too many progressives fail to recognize— there can be no justice, no honest reconciliation and healing in our nation, without full acknowledgement of complicity of the crimes of racism, including enslavement and lynching, by the white community, and with that acknowledgment, acceptance of wrongdoing, and finally atonement. This does not happen without evoking shame:
I actually believe in redemption. I believe in recovery. I believe in rehabilitation. That's why I advocate for people on death row and children who committed violent crimes and people who have broken the law. I believe in it for our country too. We cannot get to the reconciliation without the truth. We cannot get there if we don't acknowledge what it is we are struggling to recover from.
White America has much to feel ashamed about, including efforts to forget, or push to the sidelines, the legacy of enslavement and genocide, and before we ‘move past’, we must confront our true history first, as Stevenson notes in a Jeffery Toobin profile in the New Yorker:
Stevenson believes that too little attention has been paid to the hostility of whites to the civil-rights movement. “Where did all of those people go?” he said. “They had power in 1965. They voted against the Voting Rights Act, they voted against the Civil Rights Act, they were still here in 1970 and 1975 and 1980. And there was never a time when people said, ‘Oh, you know that thing about segregation forever? Oh, we were wrong. We made a mistake. That was not good.’ They never said that. And it just shifted. So they stopped saying ‘Segregation forever,’ and they said, ‘Lock them up and throw away the key.’ ”
If it wasn’t made manifest by the sixty million Americans who voted to install Trump in the White House, or the marching of Nazis in Charlottesville, the legacy of white supremacy is alive and well in Amercia:
Montgomery has dozens of cast-iron historical markers celebrating aspects of the Confederate past. Stevenson wanted to put a marker up in front of E.J.I.’s door, to point out the presence of the slave trade. “We went to the Historical Commission and said, ‘How do you get a marker up?’ ” Stevenson recalled. He was told that if he provided accurate information the commission would erect a marker. E.J.I. put together a sixty-page proposal for three markers commemorating the slave trade. Norwood Kerr, of the Alabama Department of Archives and History, e-mailed E.J.I. in response:
I have considered your request for the Alabama Historical Association to support the placement of three historical markers relating to the city’s slave trade. While your scholarship appears accurate . . . I do not think it is in the best interests of the Association to sponsor the markers given the potential for controversy.
Stevenson has taken it upon himself to force every one of us to confront the truth of the birth of our nation:
During the controversy, Stevenson visited the University of Texas Law School, in Austin, for a conference on the relationship between the death penalty and lynching. Jordan Steiker, the professor who convened the meeting, told me, “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.” Drawing on the work of such noted legal scholars as David Garland and Franklin Zimring, Steiker and his sister Carol, a professor at Harvard Law School, have written a forthcoming book, “Courting Death: The Supreme Court and Capital Punishment,” which explores the links between lynching and state-sponsored executions. The Steikers write, “The practice of lynching constituted ‘a form of unofficial capital punishment’ that in its heyday was even more common than the official kind.”
Lynchings, which took the form of hangings, shootings, beatings, and other acts of murder, were often public events, urged on by thousands, but by the nineteen-thirties the behavior of the crowds had begun to draw criticism in the North. “The only reason lynchings stopped in the American South was that the spectacle of the crowds cheering these murders was becoming problematic,” Stevenson told me. “Local law enforcement was powerless to stop the mob, even if it wanted to. So people in the North started to say that the federal government needed to send in federal troops to protect black people from these acts of terror. No one in power in the South wanted that—so they moved the lynchings indoors, in the form of executions. They guaranteed swift, sure, certain death after the trial, rather than before the trial.”
Each of us bears the responsibility to bear witness to this true history, and to give voice to the memory of those murdered.
Never forget.