I’m Not Celebrating Long-Overdue Legislation Banning Lynching
On Monday, March 7, Congress approved legislation banning lynching and making it a federal hate crime. It has only taken 200 attempts to approve such legislation. The bill now goes to President Biden to sign into law.
On April 26, 2018, I attended the opening of the Equal Justice Initiative’s (EJI) Legacy Museum and National Memorial for Peace and Justice.
The 11,000-square-foot Legacy Museum is built on the site of a former warehouse where enslaved black people were imprisoned. It is located midway between a historic slave market and the main river dock and train station. Slavers trafficked tens of thousands of enslaved black people there during the height of the domestic slave trade.
The National Memorial for Peace and Justice is a memorial to the victims of “racial terror lynchings.” The site includes a memorial square with 800 six-foot columns that include the names of victims and the counties and states where racial terror lynchings took place.
The columns are suspended from above, representing public lynchings that happened in town squares across America. The hanging columns evoke the image of hanging brown bodies. They force visitors to grapple with the vast number of lynching victims in America.
