Local residents moved by visit to Montgomery’s new National Memorial for Peace and Justice

A bronze sculpture on the grounds of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice shows several figures in chains.

By Yolanda Putman June 24, 2018 5 min read

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Local residents moved by visit to Montgomery’s new National Memorial for Peace and Justice

A tribute wall at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice includes a quote from Maya Angelou's

The structure at the center of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice is constructed of more than 800 corten steel monuments, one for each county in the United States where a racial terror lynching took place. The names of the victims are engraved on the columns.

Duplicates of all the inscribed monuments are available to the counties where lynchings took place. The Equal Justice Initiative has invited each county named on a monument in the pavilion to claim its duplicate monument and set it up in a public site on home turf, preferably at a spot where a lynching took place. Hamilton County's commemorates four men: Charlie Williams, Albert Blount, Charles Brown and Edward Johnson.

The 800 memorial monuments as seen from a distance.

Mariann Martin reads the message on a memorial wall.

Closer to home

More than 4,000 people were lynched across the South in the decades after the Civil War from 1877 to 1950. At least four men were lynched in Hamilton County.› Charles Williams, lynched on Sept. 7, 1885, at historic Hamilton County Jail, 605 Walnut St.› Alfred Blount, lynched on Feb. 9, 1893, on the Walnut Street Bridge.› Charles Brown, lynched on Feb. 25, 1897, from a bridge in Soddy-Daisy.› Ed Johnson, lynched on March 19, 1906, on the Walnut Street Bridge.

If you go

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice is at 417 Caroline St. in Montgomery, Alabama. Hours are . Tickets are $5 all ages (7 and older). Combination

Donivan Brown has toured the Vietnam Memorial, the Holocaust Museum, the Museum of African American History in Washington, D.C., and Martin Luther King Jr. museums in Atlanta and Memphis, but he says he’s never experienced anything like the emotion that overtook him at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama.

“It was more emotionally resonant than I thought it would be,” says the Chattanooga resident. Brown is a writer, organizer and speaker, a man who makes his living with words, but he says the memorial left him mute.

Such overwhelming emotion appears to be common for visitors to the memorial, which exposes a dark time in American history. It’s the country’s first museum dedicated to the legacy of enslaved black people, the more than 4,000 people terrorized by lynching, the African-Americans humiliated by racial segregation and Jim Crow, and the people of color burdened with contemporary presumptions of guilt and police violence, according to the web site eji.org.