Soraya Nadia McDonald of The Undefeated –
At the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, a key part of the experience involves making oneself vulnerable.
To read the names of each victim of lynching inscribed on the memorial’s 800-some steel corten monuments, visitors must gaze upward. The orientation forces them to consider the thousands of black people who were hunted, tortured, burned and strung up to support a violent system of white supremacy, and they must consider this from the position of a person standing in a lynch mob. Visitors are encouraged to think about their own complicity in black death while leaving one of the most delicate parts of their bodies open and exposed: their necks.
The design of the memorial evokes a truth about American history….
