Lynching Memorial Coming to Montgomery
EJI will build it near Federal Courthouse.
The Equal Justice Initiative will announce their plans today to build a multi-million dollar memorial to victims of lynching across the country, and a museum in their building on Commerce Street.
The memorial honors hundreds of people lynched by mobs in the U.S. in the decades following the civil war. It will be built on a six-acre site behind the Federal Courthouse in Downtown and will include a series of columns that seem to be floating, like bodies from trees.
Duplicate columns will also be featured, each engraved with the name of one of the 800 Counties where there were lynchings, and the names of those killed in that county. Those duplicate columns can be claimed by the counties if they agree to use them as a local memorial to the residents who were lynched.
About the museum, EJI writes:
From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration, is expected to open in April. It is housed on the site of a former slave warehouse in Montgomery, Alabama, located midway between the former slave auction block and the main river dock and train station where tens of thousands of enslaved people were trafficked during the height of the domestic slave trade.
EJI installed historic markers designating the original locations of slave depots and warehouses in Downtown Montgomery last year, including one outside their own building.
You can watch a video about the planned memorial on the EJI website HERE.
More on this story from Alabama News Network after today’s official announcement from EJI.
