What Can I Do?

www.valdostadailytimes.com/news/local_news/vsu-prof-lowndes-should-claim-lynching-monument/article_276822f5-b194-57a3-a633-b00fe4a1928b.html


Noll compared lynchings to the atrocities committed by Germany during World War II.

He said the same part of humanity's evil that led Nazis to kill Jews, gypsies and homosexuals is the same evil in humanity that drove white people to lynch black people.

The evil may be the same but the way Germany and America remember the past couldn't be further apart.

For example, in Germany, the Swastika, the emblem of the Nazi Party, is outlawed. In America, the Confederate battle flag is revered by some, displayed on bumper stickers, flown from flag poles and prominently tattooed on body parts.

Also, Germany remembers its past atrocities with memorials and monuments such as the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin.

In the South, statues are raised in the center of downtown to memorialize the Confederate dead, with little to no recognition of slaves and the thousands of black Americans killed following the end of the war.

Noll said the lack of recognition and remembrance precludes healing.

mobile.nytimes.com/2018/06/25/opinion/legacy-museum-white-supremacy-lynchings.html?smid=fb-nytopinion&smtyp=cur

NASHVILLE — I went to Montgomery, Ala., to visit the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, two new spaces commemorating the history of systemic racism in this country, but I didn’t truly believe they were meant for people like me. Surely they were aimed at other people — white people who can’t or won’t see the culture of white supremacy that surrounds them, and black people whose experience of this wrenching history is finally being documented and ratified.

I was wrong.

Montgomery was the first capital of the Confederacy and the center of an immense domestic slave trade. The Legacy Museum, which stands at the site where slaves were imprisoned before being auctioned, follows history “from enslavement to mass incarceration.” The museum is small, but its mix of meticulously researched displays — both the high-tech (holograms of 19th-century slave and 21st-century prison narratives) and the simple (a wall of jars, each containing soil from the site of a documented lynching) — offer a stark view of American history, from slavery to segregation to persistent sentencing inequities and voter suppression. It is nothing less than a narrative history of American racism.

The hallway leading from the museum’s lobby to its first exhibit is a black tunnel that slopes downward to facsimiles of cells. Inside each one, holograms tell stories of life under slavery. “Mama?” one tiny boy calls into the darkness. You have to step close to the bars to hear him.

Another display is a seemingly everlasting slide show listing some of the more than 4,000 African-Americans known to have been lynched between 1877 and 1950. Their “crimes” included refusing to run an errand for a white woman, asking a white woman for a drink of water and rejecting a white man’s bid for cottonseed. These lynchings weren’t committed solely in the former states of the Confederacy, either: Crowd-administered torture and execution also occurred in states like Ohio, New Mexico, Illinois, Kansas, Pennsylvania and others. In 1920, three African-American men were lynched before thousands of white people in Duluth, Minn.

If the Legacy Museum is an overwhelming immersion in careful data, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, its companion space, is a direct blow to the gut. Both sites are the result of years of research by the Equal Justice Initiative, a legal nonprofit that works to end racial and economic injustice, particularly in connection with mass incarceration.

When the memorial, which occupies six acres at the top of a hill overlooking downtown Montgomery, opened in April, it received considerable national attention. But nothing I read prepared me for my own emotional response to it. The centerpiece of the open-air site is a collection of more than 800 steel columns. Each is roughly the dimension of a coffin and designed to run with blood-colored rust in the rain. Each bears the name of an American county and the names and death dates of the victims who died violently there.


There is no ignoring how personal this history is. My grandfather was 19 when two black men named Juster Jennings and Sills Spinks were lynched in his Alabama county in 1920. I couldn’t help myself: After seeing the column with their names, I had to look up the distance between the place where they were lynched and my grandfather’s farm. I felt a perverse amount of relief when I realized it was almost certainly too far for him to have traveled by mule.
But I had to admit that I couldn’t honestly say whether my grandfather would have wanted to be there. By the time I knew him, he treated everyone courteously. But he also asked my grandmother to stop teaching when Alabama schools were finally integrated (she didn’t stop). So I just can’t say.

Here’s the truth about the ubiquity of racism: I’m 56 years old, and there’s a bleeding column in that memorial for every place I’ve ever lived.

The sheer numbers are devastating, but it’s their placement that works most powerfully to convey the magnitude of loss. They are mounted at eye level as visitors first enter that part of the memorial, but as the floor slopes downward, the columns begin to rise. About halfway down the walkway, looking up and straining to read the engraved names, visitors suddenly realize that they are standing beneath a representation of bodies that have been hung from nooses and left to dangle there.

calendar.eji.org/racial-injustice/oct/18?fbclid=IwAR0yCPdiff8fa_cZa42pUCDTCWlrbahAAaDq1I2oXdlQOGiAmIqXyhs-NtQ
October 18th 1933



On this day in 1933, a mob of at least 2,000 white men, women, and children in Princess Anne, Maryland lynched and burned George Armwood to death. Four white men were ultimately tried for the lynching of George Armwood and acquitted by all-white juries. To overcome racial inequality, we must confront our history. Share this #racialinjustice