Editor’s Note: Update April 26, 2018 The first national lynching memorial opens today in Montgomery, Alabama, and columns are ready to be taken by the counties where lynchings occurred. Charlottesville, Virginia, is interested. According to the Equal Justice Initiative, the opening ceremony kicks off a two-day summit at the Montgomery Performing Arts Center and Montgomery Convention Center, featuring John Lewis, Michelle Alexander, Sherrilyn Ifill, Gloria Steinem, Marian Wright Edelman, Rev. William Barber, Ava DuVernay, Elizabeth Alexander, Anna Deavere Smith, Vice President Al Gore, The Roots, Common, Piper Kerman, Bebe Winans, Sweet Honey in the Rock and the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.
Is there a way to find peace in the national psyche through design? Can a national lynching memorial help heal racial injustice?
In his TED Talk, Michael Murphy, co-founder and chief executive officer of MASS Design Group, said his newest project takes on these very questions.
Working with Bryan Stevenson of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), Murphy and his team are designing the first national lynching memorial for the victims. Murphy says the memorial, which will break ground later this year in Montgomery, Ala., will take on national collective healing.
Germany, South Africa and Rwanda have built memorials that reflect on their past atrocities in an attempt to find some peace and heal their national psyche.
We in the U.S. have yet to do this,” he said.
The lynching memorial will be located on a hill overlooking Montgomery. The related From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration Museum will be located near one of the most prominent slave auction sites and the Alabama River dock and rail station where tens of thousands of enslaved black people were trafficked, said EJI’s website.
The design contains columns that originally appear to form a classical pavilion, but actually turn out to be hanging from the ceiling. Murphy said the perception of the columns shifts when visitors enter, as they are designed to evoke lynchings in a public square. The markers name those lynched, more than 4,000 according to EJI’s research.
Outside in a field of “purgatory” will be identical columns that counties throughout the American South where the lynchings occurred can claim and bring home. That is where the monument will become part of the American psyche and become part of the journey of racial injustice, Murphy described.
As part of the project, EJI is collecting soil from the actual lynching sites to fill the columns with. Murphy noted that the team finds the act in itself restorative. “If he left one drop of sweat, one drop of blood, one hair follicle -- I pray that I dug it up and now that his whole body would be at peace,” said Anthony Ray Hinton, EJI team member, of victim William McBride.
“I have learned that architecture can be a transformative energy for change...Our nation will begin to heal from over a century of silence,” said Murphy.
EJI said they may have information for civic leaders that want to claim their counties’ columns posted on their website in the coming months.
