The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, informally known as the National Lynching Memorial, is a national memorial to commemorate the victims of lynching in the United States. The memorial was constructed in order to acknowledge the past of racial terrorism and further the continual search for social justice in America. Founded by the non-profit Equal Justice Initiative, it opened in downtown Montgomery, Alabama on April 26, 2018. The memorial was built on six acres in the downtown area of the state capital by the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), a non-profit based in Montgomery. Also under the auspices of EJI is The Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration, which opened the same day. It is built near the Montgomery site where enslaved African Americans were auctioned at market.
By studying records in counties across the United States, researchers documented almost 4400 "racial terror lynchings" between 1877 and 1950.
In central position is the memorial square with 805 hanging steel rectangles, the size and shape of coffins, representing each of the counties in the United States where a documented lynching took place, as compiled in the EJI study, Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror (2017, 3rd edition). There were more than 4300 documented lynchings of African Americans between 1877 and 1950 concentrated in 12 Southern states, but several other states are now covered. The monument is the first major work in the nation to name and honor these victims. Each of the steel plates is marked with the name of the county and state, and the names of the documented lynching victims (or "unknown" if the name is not known).
In Hank Willis Thomas' piece, Rise Up, the focal point is a wall, and emerging from the wall are statues of black heads and bodies raising their arms in surrender to the viewer. The piece brings up the notion of visibility, which is the aim of the entire monument. The viewer is asked to focus and see the subject of the artwork. This is a more current piece commenting on the police violence and police brutality prevalent in the years preceding the memorial. Hank Willis Thomas says in an interview about his art work, “I see the work that I make as asking questions.”
Outside of the structure, in the surrounding landscaped area, are benches where visitors can sit to reflect. Reflecting areas are dedicated to honor and memorialize people such as Ida B. Wells, who in the 1890s risked her life to report on the truth about lynchings. Laid in rows are corresponding steel columns identical to the ones hanging in the Memorial. These columns are intended to be temporary, and the Equal Justice Initiative is asking representatives of each of the counties to come and claim their monument and establish a memorial on home ground.
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