I finally made it to the Equal Justice Initiative’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice (also known as the National Lynching Museum). We actually drove there from Nashville in 2018 soon after it opened but arrived less than an hour before closing. A docent there told us that we would need at least an hour to walk through the site so we should come back another time. She was correct. It takes at least an hour.

The memorial square is made up of 800 hanging weathering steel monuments. When I walked into the memorial I thought they were like headstones as they were on the same level as the viewer. Each rectangle represents a county in which one or more documented lynchings took place. Inscribed on each rectangle are the name of the county and the names of the people who were victims of racial terror lynching in that county.

When you turn the first corner, the floor has a decline and the rectangles appear raised up. After the next corner, the floor descends even further and the rectangles are hanging all the way above the viewer’s head. At that point, it’s harder to read them and they seem closer together. The entire time you are in the square you can hear the running water from the fountain.

After walking through the hanging monuments, next is the memorial park. The memorial park has duplicates of all 800+ rectangles lined up and laying down. This is when I realized that they looked like coffins. Seeing them laid out that way really showed me the magnitude of the lives senselessly lost. And on top of that, one rectangle could represent one person or 20 people.

They are grouped by state and alphabetically by county so if you missed a rectangle for which you may have been looking, you’ll have the chance to see it here.

After walking through the memorial park you see the sculpture by Hank Willis Thomas which addresses the contemporary issues of police violence and racially biased criminal justice.

Lastly, are historical markers created as part of the Community Remembrance Project. EJI’s community remembrance work is part of a larger movement to create an era of restorative truth-telling and justice that changes the consciousness of our nation. 

About the Memorial for Peace and Justice:

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which opened to the public on April 26, 2018, is the nation’s first memorial dedicated to the legacy of enslaved Black people, people terrorized by lynching, African Americans humiliated by racial segregation and Jim Crow, and people of color burdened with contemporary presumptions of guilt and police violence.

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice

True peace is not merely the absence of tension; it is the presence of justice.

–Martin Luther King, Jr.