Page 27 - WTP VOl. XII #1

The group from the motel where the murder had occurred met us at our hotel that morning, and we all gathered in a multi-layered circle in the hotel lobby to have a whole group meeting. We were all feeling especially fragile. The information about the murder and the new COVID case had begun to filter through the group. There was not the usual joy with which we greeted one another each morning. Instead, we all wore saddened and shocked faces, acknowledging one another with nods and sighs. This, the beginning of the sixth day—exactly halfway into our trip— would turn out to be its nadir.
We launched into a free-wheeling discussion that covered a range of topics from empathy with those who had experienced the horror at the other hotel to expres- sions of exhaustion with the pace of the trip to reminders from the medical team to follow the established guidelines around masking, testing, and monitoring of symptoms. I spoke up about the need for us to build upon the trust we had forged together to recommit ourselves to taking care of one another’s health.
As the meeting was winding down, Martha began singing a gospel song, “We’ve Come This Far by Faith.” I was standing outside the outer ring of the circle leaning back against the front desk. Suddenly, from behind me, in a moment that crystallized the power of this trip, I was jolted by the voice of one of the hotel clerks joining us in singing. Her voice soared over the group, instantly contributing to our healing. Afterwards, I encouraged her to tell her coworkers that she was taking the day off to join us for our next concert that night. She laughed and, unfortunately, insisted that she couldn’t. To cap off the meeting, we all walked out to the bus for our day in Montgomery, singing “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around.” The spirits of the group had been at least somewhat revived through the power of song. I was glad that I had decided to stay. (I did not end up getting COVID.)
Our sixth and seventh days were in Montgomery and included a visit to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice—a memorial to those lynched in the United States. The memorial was inspired, in part,
by the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin. The Berlin memorial is a sculptural cityscape filled with 2,711 large, grey concrete slabs of varying heights arranged in a grid near the Brandenburg Gate, which I had seen in 2014. When I first read about that connection in 2018, shortly before the Montgomery memorial opened, it heartened me that Germany had contributed in some small way to the United States’ struggles to truthfully recount its history.
Before our trip to Montgomery, I had seen photo-
graphs and read descriptions, but I still wasn’t prepared for the actual experience of being at the lynching memorial. When I first entered it, situated atop a hill, I walked through rows of rusty brown pillars each attached to a long grey pipe descending from an open-air roof and anchored to the ground on the bottom. There is one pillar per county—over eight hundred in total—where a lynching occurred, with the names of the people who are known to have been lynched in that county etched into the pillar.
As I turned a corner, I heard rushing water, glanced to my right, and saw hundreds of pillars hanging in mid-air. Even though I knew in advance that this is what I would see, I gasped. In my mind, I instanta- neously saw people hanging there. I recoiled, but I forced myself to continue looking through wet eyes. In a museum, I later learned that one of the youngest lynching victims was three-years-old. I very much wish I could unlearn that. I reminded myself, though, that as much as we might all want to recoil, it’s time to fix our gazes on those histories.
On a weathered black wall was the following inscription:
FOR THE HANGED AND BEATEN.
FOR THE SHOT, DROWNED, AND BURNED.
FOR THE TORTURED, TORMENTED, AND TERRORIZED. FOR THOSE ABANDONED BY THE RULE OF LAW. WE WILL REMEMBER
WITH HOPE BECAUSE HOPELESSNESS IS THE ENEMY
OF JUSTICE.
WITH COURAGE BECAUSE PEACE REQUIRES BRAVERY.
WITH PERSISTENCE BECAUSE JUSTICE IS A CONSTANT STRUGGLE.
WITH FAITH BECAUSE WE SHALL OVERCOME.
Lynching was openly used as a tool to terrorize and subjugate the Black population after Recon- struction and through the Jim Crow era. In some instances, thousands of white people attended lynchings, celebrating in a party-like atmosphere. Hope, courage, persistence, and faith can only come from facing that brutal, racist history which informs our present.
The Equal Justice Initiative, which is responsible for
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