The National Memorial for Peace and Justice opens Thursday on a six-acre site overlooking the Alabama State Capitol in Montgomery, the New York Times reports. It is dedicated to the victims of American white supremacy, marking the lynching of thousands of black people in a decades-long campaign of racist terror. At the center is a grim cloister, a walkway with 800 weathered steel columns, all hanging from a roof. Etched on each column is the name of a county and the people who were lynched there, most listed by name, many simply as “unknown.” The circumstances of individual lynchings are described in brief summaries along the walk. Among them are Parks Banks, lynched in Mississippi in 1922 for carrying a photograph of a white woman; Caleb Gadly, hanged in Kentucky in 1894 for “walking behind the wife of his white employer,” and Mary Turner, who after denouncing her husband’s lynching by a white mob, was hung upside down, burned and sliced open so that her unborn child fell to the ground.
Bryan Stevenson, the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, the nonprofit organization behind the memorial, said that many of the victims “have never been named in public.” Stevenson and a small group of lawyers spent years immersing themselves in archives and county libraries to document the thousands of racial terror lynchings across the South. They have cataloged nearly 4,400. Inspired by the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin and the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, Stevenson decided that a single memorial was the most powerful way to give a sense of the scale of the bloodshed. Also at the site are duplicates of each steel column, lined up in rows like coffins, intended to be sent to the counties where lynchings were carried out