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

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.

Instead of allowing guests to walk past a period when black people could be illegally hanged and tortured, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice forces visitors to confront it. Museum organizers say it's necessary to acknowledge the past before racial reconciliation can be achieved in the future.

Brown was among hundreds of visitors who toured the museum on opening day in late April, among about 10,000 who toured the facility in its first week.

Halfway in, he recalls, he was so overcome that he paused to hold back tears. He considered leaving, but stayed.

"There are these massive iron pillars," he says. "Once I got there, once I started to move into it, I thought this is uncomfortable. I'm walking through a field of lynched bodies, in essence."

The venture doesn't end after the lynching experience, he says.

There are statues of blacks bent and bound with chains around their necks, hands and feet. And references to mass incarceration and "those abandoned by the rule of law."

To exit, visitors must walk through massive statues of older African-American women, elders and grandmothers. No one can just walk through them. They must slow down and walk around them. The monuments lead visitors to a 25-foot-long slab with bodies being submerged into the ocean.

"I was calming down," says Brown. "I had made it through the gauntlet, but I turned the corner and it's as if my kin are being submerged into water and their hands are raised up."

Work on the memorial began in 2010 when the Equal Justice Initiative staff began investigating the history of lynchings. Set on a 6-acre site, the memorial uses sculpture, art and design to depict racial terror.

"I guess it's designed to mimic the horror. But it's also beautiful," says Brown.

The site includes a memorial square with 800 6-foot monuments personifying thousands of lynching victims and the counties and states where the terrorism took place, according to the memorial's website.

"It was really, really quiet," Brown says, recalling the atmosphere. "There were hundreds of people within it, but it was really quiet."

Fellow Chattanoogan Mariann Martin agrees that it is an experience like no other.

"You just really feel," she says.

Martin says that seeing so many columns and names of people lynched overwhelmed her.

"You just think of them as an individual whose life was robbed and of how families and communities and entire generations lost a person unjustly because of hatred," she says.

The visit makes her more passionate about sharing the stories of people lynched.

"We can't replace their lives. They're gone," she says. "But we must remember them as people who lost their lives unjustly."

Martin, who is white, and Brown, who is black, are among two dozen local residents who are members of the Ed Johnson Project, a local nonprofit dedicated to the remembrance of a black man lynched by a mob on the Walnut Street Bridge in 1906. The committee is spearheading an effort to install a local monument recognizing Johnson and the attorneys who risked their lives arguing on his behalf.

Artist Jerome Meadows of Savannah, Georgia, and his team have been selected to design the monument.

It features Johnson and his attorneys: Noah Parden, who became the first African-American to argue as lead counsel before the U.S. Supreme Court, and Styles Hutchins, who became the first black lawyer to practice in Georgia.

Johnson is one of at least four men who were lynched in Hamilton County. The others whose histories are known were Alfred Blount, Charles Williams and Charles Brown.

Equal Justice Initiative officials came to Chattanooga in 2017 to collect soil from each of the areas where the men were lynched. Each sample is included in the lynching memorial.

The museum's founder, criminal-defense attorney Bryan Stevenson, said during a "60 Minutes" interview with Oprah Winfrey that his intent was to memorialize the people who died wrongful deaths with hardly any acknowledgment of the injustice against them and their families.

"Something happened here that was wrong," he told Winfrey. "Something happened here that was unjust, and too few people have talked about it, and so we want to acknowledge the wrong that happened."

Contact Yolanda Putman at yputman@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6431.

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