Many issues limit the progress of African Americans today. Here I will address two that get too little attention.
1. One is the denial of the history of racial oppression by whites
2. The other is the reluctance of African Americans to talk about that racial oppression.
Most whites acknowledge segregation; however, many typify it as African Americans going to separate schools, sitting in the back of the bus, and drinking from a separate water fountain. They tend not to admit to the racial terrorism that sustained segregation.
On the other hand, many African Africans are aware of the racial violence that their parents and grandparents faced. All too many African Americans wish to move beyond our oppressive past, feeling that it is too painful. However, we have too much unfinished business to do that. We must reckon with the past before we can move beyond it.
The Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) believes that we must publicly face the truth about our history before we can have recovery and reconciliation. As EJI’s founding director, Bryan Stevenson, explains,
“Our nation’s history of racial injustice casts a shadow across the American landscape. This shadow cannot be lifted until we shine the light of truth on the destructive violence that shaped our nation, traumatized people of color, and compromised our commitment to the rule of law and to equal justice.”
This week the EJI will begin to force these two issues into the American conversation. They will open its new lynching museum in Montgomery, Alabama. Its avowed purpose is to force consideration of racial matters in the United States since slavery to make possible a movement toward reconciliation.
I have argued that we cannot have an effective truth and reconciliation effort until the United States faces up to its past and acknowledges what the country did to its African American citizens. The lynching museum is a long-needed powerful step in that direction.
The formal name of the new lynching museum is the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. It will be “the nation’s first memorial dedicated to the legacy of enslaved black people, people terrorized by lynching, African Americans humiliated by racial segregation and Jim Crow, and people of color burdened with contemporary presumptions of guilt and police violence.”
The National Memorial for Peace and Justice provides a sacred space for truth-telling and reflection about racial terrorism and its legacy.
EJI has documented over 4400 African Americans lynched in the United States between 1877, the end of Reconstruction, and 1950. Thus, they identified 800 more lynchings than had previously been recognized.
EJI’s Community Remembrance Project recognizes lynching victims by collecting soil from lynching sites and erecting historical markers. This act acknowledges the horrors of lynching, which some white perpetrators treated as sport.
Any fruitful discussion about our racial future must start by discussing our dark past and how it has continued to the present day. Hooray for the new museum that addresses slavery, post-slavery racial terrorism, and current day unjust mass incarceration.