A civil rights memorial in Alabama expands to document lynching victims' stories

https://www.npr.org/2022/04/21/ [login to see] /equal-justice-initiative-civil-rights-lynching-memorial-alabama
More than a million people have visited the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Ala., since it opened four years ago.

It's a project of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) that remembers thousands of lynching victims. Their names are etched on 800 steel blocks — one for each U.S. county where racial killings occurred. The monuments hang from an open-air pavilion on a hilltop overlooking the Montgomery skyline.

Now the memorial is expanding.

"We call this new section Community Reckoning," says EJI founder and Executive Director Bryan Stevenson. "It's the way in which communities are asking localities to kind of reckon with this history — to remember, to talk more honestly and more thoughtfully about what this history represents."

Lynching violence was local, Stevenson says. Here, visitors get a more detailed narrative about specific cases in the form of historical markers that look like what you might see alongside a highway. They represent similar signs that local groups have erected around the country based on the EJI's research.