As a National Lynching Museum Opens, Dallas Considers Its Own Memorial

Suspended steel beams, more than 800 of them, beckon all eyes passing beneath, upward, higher and higher, to gaze at the haunting, hanging rows of multicolored markers. The 800 steel signs represent counties where lynch victims were murdered between 1877 and 1950.Victims' names and the dates of the racial terrorism are etched onto each piece of uneven, rusted steel, an unbending metal, perhaps a match to myriad black skin tones of stolen humanity. These represent more than 4,300 souls who were accused, snatched, shot, beaten, dragged, hanged and dismembered or set ablaze, then sometimes photographed for souvenir postcards.This month the National Memorial for Peace & Justice and Legacy Museum opened in Montgomery. The work is the brainchild of one of my heroes, civil rights attorney Bryan Stevenson, and his brilliant team at Equal Justice Initiative. I asked Stevenson the importance of teaching these lessons to all.  Continue reading...