With the Memorial for Peace and Justice, the EJI has created that public square. It is both a major contribution to memorial architecture and a provocative intervention into American memory. From the entrance gate, down the sloping lawn from the central pavilion, the rows of markers appear as columns. It gives the memorial a neoclassical look, reminiscent of a colonnade, or a steel interpretation of the Parthenon. And a walk through the first hallway seems to confirm that sense. The markers are made of corten steel, weathered to a burnt ocher. Six feet tall, they stand flush with the floor, connected to the ceiling by a pole. They are arranged in offset rows, so there’s no clear path through—no matter how you proceed, you wind up face to face with a marker, with the history and the violence it commemorates.
It wasn’t until I turned the first corner of the memorial that I realized that the markers did not, in fact, bear the weight of the roof. The floor of the second hallway sloped downward, but the markers kept their level. As I descended, it seemed as though the markers were rising above me. As I moved, the memorial moved. And it was only then that I saw them for what they are: not columns but gallows.
It’s worth noting: the term “racial terror lynching” is used here to distinguish from other public hangings of the era, like those that took place in the Old West, perpetrated by vigilantes in communities where criminal justice systems had yet to be implemented. The lynchings commemorated here specifically targeted people of color and occurred in places where there was an established criminal justice system. And they took place without intervention from—and often were condoned by—that system. Indeed, men and women of color were regularly murdered on the courthouse lawn for crimes such as wearing a military uniform or bumping into a white person on the street, and less than 1 percent of those responsible for the violence were ever held to account. For over a century, the federal government failed to pass antilynching legislation; finally, a largely symbolic bill was passed the year after the memorial’s opening. All told, these public-spectacle murders served as a reminder to whole communities of how American society was structured. And how that structure was enforced. They were, in short, terrorism.
By the time I’d reached the end of the second corridor, the markers hung far above my head, stock-still and looming. I stood beneath them, looking up. This vantage point is no accident. A sign on one wall informs that a 1920 lynching in Duluth, Minnesota, drew a crowd of thousands. Another, in Waco, Texas, a few years earlier, brought out 15,000. Often at museums, my impulse is to project myself into the story, to make it personal. At the Holocaust museum in Washington, you are even given an ID card of someone whose story you follow through the exhibitions. Standing at the bottom of the second corridor of this memorial, the relation becomes clear—my surrogates are the men and women who committed, attended, bought postcards of these lynchings. By positioning me so, the design of the memorial insists that I acknowledge this connection. White Americans’ potential to change, to create a more equitable and peaceful future, the EJI argues, depends on our ability to claim this history as our own, to understand ourselves in its context. Here, underground, under these markers, the memorial asks us to take the weight, confront the racial violence that anchors American life, or we will never get out from under it.
At the end of the pavilion’s circuit, I passed through an opening that led me to the courtyard, where I scaled the mound and could look out over the memorial and see how it framed the view of everything beyond it. In 77 years, 4400 lynchings. That averages to a lynching every six days—roughly one every week. For 77 years. Every week from the end of Reconstruction to the dawn of the civil rights movement, every week from the circus debut of the human cannonball to the announcement of possible rocket flights to the moon, every week from Forrest’s death to my mother’s birth, white Americans lynched Black Americans so that we could be white. So much changed in that time; our psychosis about race did not. Standing in the center of the memorial, the markers all around me, the point was clear: racial terror was the clockwork of America life.
Even having read the EJI’s report and having spent the past several years tracing Forrest’s life and legacy through American life—one that’s bound up in so many moments of racial reckoning—still, surveying the rows of markers, I was astounded, bereft. As I climbed down the central mound in the courtyard, I realized why I kept swallowing and sucking my teeth as I moved through the memorial: all that weathered steel tasted like blood in my mouth.
Outside the pavilion, I found duplicates of each of the markers, laid out horizontally like coffins awaiting burial—the “memory bank,” as the memorial’s design team calls it. Every county is invited to claim the marker and display it at the site of a lynching. Just as the memorial moves as we move, the memory bank will change as we change. And the unclaimed markers will remain here, in rebuke of those counties who have looked away once more from this past. Ignoring this history leaves a mark, too. The memorial will become not just a repository for a broader collective memory, but for our collective forgetting, too.
There is, of course, the inevitable counterargument: 1877 to 1950? That’s over and done. But by gut-checking some 800 American counties, the memorial challenges any easy assumption about the inevitability of progress. And it prompts questions about what became of those who committed these lynchings, attended them, or turned a blind eye to them? And what happened to their children? What happened to the systems of power that condoned them, required them? What happened to the story told to justify these actions and inactions? Was there some grand transformation? When?
Laid out horizontally, these duplicate markers call to mind the grid of boxes that make up Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial, another city using its physical space to grapple with its past. Likewise, the vertically arranged markers in the memorial reference the pillars that front the Apartheid Museum in South Africa—part of that country’s larger project of truth and reconciliation. No such commission has ever been convened in the United States to reckon the toll of our own apartheid. The Memorial to Peace and Justice puts forward one ledger to be accounted for.
In this way, the memorial is an architectural embodiment of Bryan Stevenson’s argument that truth and reconciliation are sequential. Thus, no overtures are made to reconciliation here. You are not meant to be consoled, but rather to be confronted. The white American instinct to move toward absolution and innocence is short-circuited here. Instead, in the memorial’s very design, visitors are forced to grapple with their place in a system of disenfranchisement, violence, and moral oblivion. Otherwise, so many of us would have only the flimsiest sense of what needed to be reckoned. If we have no idea of who we’ve been, we have no idea who we are. And thus have no hope of changing. The memorial is a dynamic testament to the idea that a country cannot escape its history. Rather, it must be faced, so that, as the memorial’s designer Michael Murphy argues, “Our nation will begin to heal from over a century of silence.”
After i finished walking through the memorial, I was shaken, not yet ready to head home. So I took a walk around the surrounding neighborhood. Next door to the entrance of the memorial is an Alabama State parole office. The two-face God at work again. From there, I climbed down the hill to the banks of the Alabama River. Where the river bends to a U, a sign informed that in 1961, after days of torrential rain, the river flooded to a point marked there where I stood. I looked left and right, unable to find the high-water line. But then I looked up. High on a pole above me, like the mast of a ship, was the mark. So high—58 feet, 1 inch, to be precise—that I had to crane my neck the whole way back to see it.
Biblical, the amount of water that fell in 1961—just five years after Officer Day, my predecessor, arrested Rosa Parks down the street from where I stood, and a century after Forrest left the plantation for the cavalry. It occurred to me that, for years, as I chased Forrest’s memory across the country, it was Forrest, more than anyone else, who has taught me the meaning of whiteness in America. The battles over his monuments, on th
e other hand, point a way forward, show how we might learn to be another way.
In Roman mythology, it is Janus, the two-face God, who presides over transitions—the beginnings and the endings of wars, of births and deaths. And, really, the tension between the monument and the memorial is one of life and death. The monument immortalizes; the memorial mourns. Confederate monuments believe that God will vindicate us, that we are already redeemed by history, that there is nothing for which to account. They strike a defensive posture that refuses to dig into the darker aspects of the past, wants both faces to look away. Memorials like the one in Montgomery ask Americans to forego such beliefs, and instead ask us to grieve, to sit in the weight of who we have been, and to let that weight mold our sense of who we are. Memorials, in other words, want to hold us to account. Fitting then, that the Memorial for Peace and Justice is located in Montgomery, both the cradle of the Confederacy and the birthplace of the civil rights movement. Out of the tumult of the city of the two-face God, the Equal Justice Initiative is charting a course toward a possible peace.
A breeze coming in off the bend in the river brought to mind the raft ride that took Forrest from President’s Island back to mainland Memphis to die. “The same night they buried him, there came a storm,” wrote journalist Lafcadio Hearn, who had stopped in Memphis on his way to New Orleans that day. From his hotel room, Hearn watched the storm come in and “somehow or other the queer fancy came to me that the dead Confederate cavalrymen, rejoined by their desperate leader, were fighting ghostly battles with the men who died for the Union.”
That ghostly battle still rages. Same war, same general. Storms gather, waters rise. Ending this war will require a moral clarity about the meaning and consequence of America’s past—one that few Americans have proved capable of. Because simply knowing our history cannot redeem us, cannot, as they say in Selma, get us to the “beyond.” Knowledge alone cannot make the nation more just or equitable, nor does it create or change policy. Knowledge alone cannot undo what’s been done in white America’s name. What a clear-eyed sense of American history can do, however, is show us how to look forward and backward at the same time, to see how the past marks the present like the waterline left after a flood. If we hear, in the sally port’s clang, the echoes of President’s Island; feel, in the pull of the voting booth’s curtain, the brush of the calico mask; see, in the diverging lines of American wealth, the logbooks of the Adams Street Negro Mart; then, even at this eleventh hour, we might remember the country more fully, and in so doing, join in the work of reconstructing it.
acknowledgments
First, I’d like to thank everyone who spoke to me for this book. I am grateful to all of you for sharing your stories and your insight, without which this book would not exist.
To Chip Brantley and Andrew Beck Grace: thank you for all the advice, friendship, and calls at the shop. I hope you find some cinnamon here.
Thanks also to my many teachers. Through his encouragement and support, his patience and guidance, L. Lamar Wilson gave this project life. Thanks to Michael Martone, for the gift of anecdotage; here it is, come back to you. To Kiese Laymon, for showing me the power and responsibility of revision. I am forever indebted. Eve Dunbar once asked me to consider what it means to be alive to American history. A decade later, I hazard this book as an answer.
A heartfelt “Roll Tide” to everyone at the University of Alabama—especially Joel Brouwer, Wendy Rawlings, James Andrew Crank, Kellie Wells, Hali Felt, and Utz McKnight.
I am especially grateful to my editors, Betsy Gleick and Chuck Adams, whose insights, care, and direction have shaped and improved this book considerably. And to Melissa Flashman, at Janklow & Nesbit, for seeing the potential in this book and then advocating for it every step of the way.
I have been buoyed by the friendship and counsel of Andrew Stevens, Nabila Lovelace, Nate Hardy, Brian Oliu, Briana Markoff, Kyes Stevens, Joe Lucido, Kit Emslie, P. J. Williams, Ryan Bollenbach, Brian Slagle, Graham Smith, Stephen O’Neill, Zachary Towne-Smith, and Nathan Towne-Smith—a million thanks to them for chewing the cud, kicking the tires, and keeping the faith.
To my parents, Daniel O’Neill and Sally Towne: thank you for instilling in me a sense of curiosity, for fostering a sense of engagement with the world, and for handing down that dusty old sedan. I hope this book makes you proud.
And, finally, to Shaelyn Smith, for the butter and the bread: thank you, thank you.
notes
I relied on Jack Hurst’s Nathan Bedford Forrest: A Biography for much of the basic information about Forrest. Hurst provides a comprehensive, objective chronicle of the general’s complicated life. Paul Ashdown and Edward Caudill’s The Myth of Nathan Bedford Forrest assembles a clear picture of Forrest’s afterlife—his legacy and legend—and it proved equally useful in the writing of this book. Biographical information was rounded out by Brian Steele Wills’s A Battle From the Start: The Life of Nathan Bedford Forrest, and Andrew Nelson Lytle’s Bedford Forrest and His Critter Company—the former for its information on Forrest’s role in the Klan, the latter for the way Lytle channels the emotional resonance of Forrest’s life. Just as Stephen Colbert used to “feel the news at you,” Lytle does the same with Forrest.
Erika Doss’s Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America was essential in understanding the history and cultural function of monuments and memorials. Likewise, I relied on Colin Rafferty’s Hallow This Ground for its delineation of monuments and memorials, and as a model for negotiating the personal and the political while writing about them. Dell Upton’s What Can and Can’t Be Said: Race, Uplift, and Monument Building in the Contemporary South provided a framework for charting the tensions between Civil War and civil rights memorials, with special attention to Selma’s symbolic landscape. Dr. Derek H. Alderman, both in his scholarship and in conversation with me, deepened my sense of how memorializing the past inevitably reveals power struggles in the present.
A number of writers and thinkers helped to shape my understanding of race—its social construction and its very real consequences. Among them were James Baldwin (especially his essay “The White Man’s Guilt”), Nikole Hannah-Jones and her reporting on school segregation, Lillian Smith’s Killers of the Dream, Noel Ignatiev and John Garner’s work in the journal Race Traitor, John Biewen and Chenjerai Kumanyika’s podcast series Seeing White, Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism, Nell Irvin Painter’s The History of White People, and Patty McIntosh’s essay “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.”
Throughout the book, I attempted to be as transparent as possible in my sourcing of information. Occasionally, though—for the sake of a sentence’s rhythm or, because of the sheer number of names and dates and titles to keep track of in this book, out of mercy for the reader—I opted not to cite a source in text. I’ve included those works here.
Part One
Edward E. Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism deeply informed my understanding of the economic and political situation in the years leading up to the Civil War—emphasizing just how catalytic and cataclysmic the slave system was. Jill Lepore’s These Truths: A History of the United States set the tensions of the Civil War in a longer context, striking at the central paradox of American notions of freedom and pointing up the enduring questions of the nation: By what sources do Americans draw power? Who is the “we” in “we the people”? References made to the wealth generated on West Indian plantations and the history of the slave trade in New England are also sourced from her book. I’ve been guided throughout by her credo that “The past is an inheritance, a gift and a burden. It can’t be shirked. You carry it everywhere. There’s nothing for it but to get to know it.”
John Hardy’s antebellum history Selma: Her Institutions and Her Men helped me to localize these broader American themes in Alabama’s Black Belt region. Information on Elodie and Nathaniel Dawson came from Practical Strang
ers: The Courtship Correspondence of Nathaniel Dawson and Elodie Todd, Sister of Mary Todd Lincoln, a collection edited by Stephen Berry and Angela Esco Elder. Biographical information on Benjamin Turner is sourced from Alston Fitts’s book Selma: A Bicentennial History. Fitts’s patience and generosity over the course of several interviews is also deeply appreciated. Brigadier General Edward Winslow’s letter, referenced in Chapter Two, I found included in The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies.
I relied on David Blight’s work—in book and lecture form—to better understand the Civil War’s legacy and the consequences of its disputed memories.
I’d also like to extend my gratitude to the Selma Dallas County Public Library—their collections of city council minutes, microfilm, and newspaper clipping files provided the foundation of my research into the 2000 mayoral election and the Forrest statue’s dedication, theft, and replacement. Alvin Benn, journeyman reporter, chronicled this saga in a series of particularly enlightening articles for The Montgomery Advertiser included in the library’s collection. Thanks also to librarian Stephen Posey for his help.
Part Two
My understanding of the stakes of recent college campus protests was shaped, in no small part, by three scholarly essays. Historical context for the reemergence of Confederate symbols came from Logan Strother, Spencer Piston, and Thomas Ogorzalek’s essay “Pride or Prejudice?: Racial Prejudice, Southern Heritage, and White Support for the Confederate Battle Flag” published in the Du Bois Review. Stephen Clowney’s essay “Landscape Fairness: Removing Discimination from the Built Environment” mapped that history onto monuments and memorials. Jordan P. Brasher, Derek H. Alderman, and Joshua F.J. Inwood’s essay “Applying Critical Race and Memory Studies to University Place Naming Controversies: Toward a Responsible Landscape Policy” offered a deeper context for the debates on American college campuses with a useful theory of a “hidden curriculum” reflected in the names and statuary of a campus.
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