*WARNING* Graphic Images and Language Below
The Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) recently announced their plans to build a national memorial in commemoration of victims of lynching throughout the United States. According to their website the EJI has purchased “six acres of land atop a rise that overlooks the City of Montgomery [Alabama] and out to the American South, where terror lynchings were most prevalent.” The monument will consist of 800 columns, one for each county where the EJI documented racial terror lynchings. According the EIJ’s website, upon entry to the memorial “the ground drops and perception shifts as visitors realize that the columns that appeared to be holding up the structure are actually monuments suspended from above, which evoke the lynchings that took place in the public square. Over 4000 names of lynching victims will be inscribed on these monuments.
The Equal Justice Initiative will be inviting each of these counties to retrieve their county’s monument and place it back where the lynchings occurred. “The National Memorial for Peace and Justice hopes to have component pieces all over the United States where racial terror lynchings have been documented. Over time, the national memorial will serve as a report on which parts of the country have confronted the truth of this terror and which have not.”
This will be the first memorial of its kind related to our history of racial terrorism. Those who oppose this kind of memorial should consider that other nations have created similar memorials for their past. Both Germany and South Africa have built memorials to show repentance for the Holocaust and the apartheid. The last documented lynching in the United States took place less than fifty years ago. That’s likely within your parents or grandparent’s lifetime. Lynching isn’t some far off idea that happened “back in history.” This memorial is meant for people who were viciously murdered, and whose murders were racially-motivated. This relates to people like Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old African-American child who was killed for having the audacity to flirt with a white woman.
Emmett Till’s mother chose to have an open casket at his funeral to show what was left of her child. The brutal images made international news and caused public outcry. However, his killers were found not-guilty of his kidnapping and murder, and later protected by double jeopardy and openly admitted to their crimes. Emmett Till’s death is not an outlier or a fluke in history. His death was one of many that took place cruelly and purposefully.
According to the NAACP there are 4,743 documented cases of lynchings between 1882 and 1968 in the United States. 3,446 of these people were people of color while 1,297 were white people. The minority group of white people were often lynched for helping people of color, being anti-lynching, or for domestic crimes. 79% of lynchings took place in the South and were mainly people of color. Of those that did not take place in the South, they were mainly in the West and done to white people. Those punished were typically charged with murder or cattle theft.
It may or may not surprise you that Wicomico County (Maryland) will be one of the counties listed at this memorial. The second to last lynching in Maryland took place in Salisbury, in 1931. Matthew Williams was shot and killed by his white employer after a wage dispute. Historical records vary on how he was injured, but Williams was taken to the hospital and placed in the “negro ward” suffering from a gunshot wound. After being falsely reported as being dead by what we now know as the Daily Times, an update was given informing the community he was still alive. On December 4th, a group of approximately 300 white men gathered to take him from the hospital (modern day PRMC) They were met with resistance at the entrance from Police Chief N.H. Holland and Deputy John Parks, however the men broke in through a back entrance of the hospital. According to the Archives of Maryland Biographical Series the superintendent of the hospital, Miss Helen V. Wise told them “If you must take him, do it quietly.” Williams, already in a straightjacket, was thrown out of a window and dragged to downtown Salisbury at the corner of South Division Street and Main Street, where he was lynched on the lawn of the courthouse
We must recognize that we as a nation allowed thousands of people to be murdered, primarily because of the color of their skin. This monument will be one of remembrance and repentance. I’ll leave you with this:
“Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society must take the place of the victim, and on his behalf demand atonement or grant forgiveness.”
– W.H. Auden