Plain Injustice

Located in downtown Montgomery, not far from the Alabama State Capitol, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice opened in April 2018, to honour thousands of victims of racially motivated lynchings. At the centre of the large hilltop site, 800 weathered steel columns fill the air, representing every individual county in the United States where a “racial terror lynching took place” between 1877 and 1950. The names of victims are engraved on these columns, each the size of a man. Elsewhere, hundreds of Mason jars are filled with dirt from where assassinations are known to have occurred. “It is not a conventional museum,” the New York Times reported several years ago. “It is perhaps better described as the presentation of an argument.”

With both the memorial and powerful research reports, the non-profit Equal Justice Initiative argues that Americans must have frank conversations “to confront the injustice, inequality, anguish, and suffering that racial terror...