America's first lynching memorial results in some local residents filled with ire, resentment

The newly opened National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, pays tribute to lynching victims across America.

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Last week, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice opened in Montgomery, Alabama to pay tribute to the nearly 4,000 documented black victims of racial lynching and terror in the United States. And because our country’s response to anything that forces us to confront our racial history and its legacy is both ridiculous and sophomoric, you can imagine that some folks are already saying that it is completely unnecessary and that we should leave the past behind us. 

As Sam Levin writes in The Guardian, some locals in Montgomery feel resentful that the museum is “dredging up the past.”

“It’s going to cause an uproar and open old wounds,” said Mikki Keenan, a 58-year-old longtime Montgomery resident, who was eating lunch at a southern country-style restaurant a mile from the memorial. Local residents, she said, feel “it’s a waste of money, a waste of space and it’s bringing up bullshit”.

“It keeps putting the emphasis on discrimination and cruelty,” chimed in her friend, who asked not to be named for fear that her child would disapprove of her remarks. The memorial, she added, could spark violence.

The irony here is mind blowing. These folks actually believe that the lynching memorial is a symbol of discrimination and cruelty but hundreds of Confederate monuments, erected to pay homage to those who wanted to preserve slavery, are not. Even more importantly, since we know that most of those Confederate monuments were not put up during or immediately after the Civil War, but instead during the Jim Crow era to intimidate and resist black equality, it is those memorials that we should be calling cruel and labeling as bullshit—not the space that is intentionally designed for us to finally have an adult conversation about the generational trauma and terror black people have experienced since we forcibly arrived upon America’s shores. 

Here’s a very unpopular truth that needs widespread telling: Americans have a very convenient and particular way of denying the truth of our history. Like any big dysfunctional family with terrible secrets and skeletons in the closet, we refuse to risk the consequences of telling each other the truth. So we minimize and sweep unpleasantness under the rug. We also lie about it entirely. This is how some white Southerners can bastardize history, worship the Confederacy as a heritage worth preserving, and then tell themselves the following about the new memorial—all while being completely serious about it.

As The Guardian describes: 

“Bring that stuff to light, and let it be there, but don’t dwell on it,” said Tommy Rhodes, a member of the Alabama Sons of Confederate Veterans. “We have moved past it … You don’t want to entice them and feed any fuel to the fire.”

Randall Hughey, another member who also owns a local radio station, emphasized his support of the museum – but also repeatedly questioned the veracity of its facts.

“They have every right to have the memorial, if it’s accurate,” he said, adding that he was perplexed by reports of more than 4,000 lynchings. “That seems pretty incredible to me that there would be that many documented lynchings … That was not the norm.”

It’s easy to write this off as ignorance. We do that a lot about the South (something we will return to shortly). Ignorance of history, as in lack of knowledge and information, is partially to blame. After all, we can’t seriously expect people to know real facts when we have an administration calling anything and everything it doesn’t like “fake news,” and offering “alternative facts” instead. Likewise, we can’t expect people to have a full and nuanced understanding of history when we have actual public school textbooks in places like Texas that list Moses as a Founding Father and call enslaved Africans “workers” and “immigrants.” But ignorance is hardly an excuse for these kinds of lies and mental gymnastics to disguise the ugly truth—especially when those lies are abusive manipulation and the result of a hideously distorted national self-image. The lies we tell ourselves about our history are not just white lies told so that we don’t have to risk ruining the veneer of politeness. They are dangerous. They are rooted in dominance and white supremacy and they intentionally come at the expense of the most marginalized populations.

This is not just a Southern problem. It is a national one. Sure, the South was the cradle of the confederacy. It is the place that black folks migrated away from in mass over the course of five decades, leaving behind the agrarian economy and families they knew so well. But it wasn’t as if a panacea and racial utopia awaited them. They encountered de facto segregation and barriers to employment, housing, and schooling, limiting their social and economic mobility which continued well into the present. In fact, there is data that suggests that the most racist places in America today are in the northeast and in midwestern states like Michigan and Ohio. Anti-black racism may have special meaning and history in the American South, but other states have perfected their particular version of it. 

But let’s get back to how certain folks in Montgomery not only think that the memorial is addressing a topic best left unspoken, they also think it’s going to facilitate some kind of violent racial uprising among blacks. Because, of course. Apparently, it’s impossible for black folks to discuss historical injustice lest we lose control and resort to rioting and scaring the ever-loving shit out of white people. The use of certain language like “you don’t want to entice them,”  “I think they just need to leave it alone,” and “it’s just stirring up something” tells us that these people think blacks are inferior savages who pose a constant threat to their safety and well-being.

It is also telling that they don’t acknowledge that this is most certainly their history too. Black people didn’t lynch themselves. We know that there were lynchers and that crowds of people gathered to watch. They brought their kids. They even held picnics and lynching parties. But, amazingly, none of these white folks admit that they had a relative who talked about lynchings and/or went to one or, worse still, actually was responsible for one. So they pivot right back to black people, and make us somehow responsible for racism while trying to hide the sins of their kin. Black people are given the tremendous burden of having to put whites at ease about the horrible realities of racial terror in America—not just about anti-black racism but also to ensure them that their wild fantasies about becoming the victims of “reverse racism” (which is most certainly not a real thing) will never come true.

One cannot cure a disease in the body if they ignore it and never go to the doctor. Likewise, we cannot heal as a nation if we are the family that lies to each other constantly and ad infinitum about the harm, toxic behavior, white supremacy, and ugliness that have defined us for so long. Our past, present, and future as whites, blacks, and people of color living in this country are inextricably linked. This is our collective sadness and grief. It is our collective shame. It is also an opportunity to start to have the kind of healthy, trusting relationships across race that white supremacy denies all of us. It is well past time that we grew up, told the truth learned from our history, and made some better choices for the future. 

As two Alabamians put it so eloquently:

“For so long, society has put a shadow over these things,” said Brittany Willie, a 19-year-old from Huntsville, Alabama, who found an engraving of the name of one of her ancestors. “People are going to see this and realize these people were innocent. They were killed for who they are.”

“This is something our children need to know, so they can understand the struggle,” added Victoria Dunn, a 40-year-old Montgomery resident, who came with her husband.

“This is going to be something embraced by everybody.”

We can’t ignore the history of lynchings, racism, and white supremacy and “let sleeping dogs” just lie—particularly when we continue to glorify historical monuments that are markers of centuries of pain, terror, and abuse and masquerade them as part of the glory days of old. That is what actually incites violence and anger and causes racial uprising. We saw this in Charlottesville and it ended up killing a white woman and injuring many others. That’s what we should be afraid of. It’s just that when that kind of racial violence is done in the name of white people trying to force blacks into subjugation, some Americans seem not to be able to see it.