Keep Remembering”

The memorial is a maze of concrete and steel. Visitors are asked to stay off the grass, and follow the steps and sidewalks through the cemented cemetery that houses rusting representations of racism, death, and injustice. Statues of slaves bound by shackles, an infant dangling from its mother’s arms, reach toward the entrance as exit as you make your way to the memorial site. A narrative engraved on wall stone offers a storied history of white supremacy, racial terrorism, and lynchings in the southern United States. The narrative context feels moot, but necessary, as some people silently read the passages to themselves while others congregate to share whispered conversations between monuments, absorbing the enormous weight and significance of the sacred space that demands a church-like reverence.The words and symbols tell a story of intergenerational, racialized, state-sanctioned genocide. The memorial and companion museum (housed offsite in a former slave warehouse) relate a narrative that connects slavery to lynching to mass incarceration. Together and separate, the sites suggest that lynchings are not just a past sin, but a present and ongoing one.The crowd contains a barrage of Black folk who make eye-contact connections as they crisscross the paved pathway; some, I learn from listening, have visited before, visit often. A Black grandmother reads the inscription of the second narrative to her two granddaughters, while her daughter, their mother, watches from a distance. In the crowd the little girls know to stay close. They lower their heads to hear their grandmother’s hushed tone voice, and lift their eyes to watch the words as she spoke. I linger to listen as she tells them they must take advantage of every opportunity they are given, and explains to them, “You don’t have to ask permission for everything, but your ancestors did.”White witnesses linger between Black bodies still and ashamed, their eyes apologetic as they watch the pained expressions and tear-stained faces of their peers. The shared grief shadows the statues as we all move beneath and between them, between each other, seeking the peace promised in the memorial name.The background story leads to the memorial square at the center of the site, and unlike the crouching you do at tombstones, you look up to see steel columns, shaped like coffins, hanging from the outdoor open ceiling like bodies hung from trees. As you walk through the memorial, the ground slopes and your walking feels like suffocation as the monuments hang above your head and around you, each step lowering you beneath the columns until you can’t breathe. The symbolic structures and dizzying design is brilliant, the columns strategically separated by state and county, in ascending and alphabetical order. The maze becomes a map as you follow over 800 columns representing each county and state in the United States where a lynching happened. The geographically organized markers symbolize thousands of dead black men and women, and document their name, if their name is known.I remember the approximate location of the Chatham County, North Carolina, marker from my first visit to the memorial six months earlier, and find it again. Chatham County is where generations of my family lived and still live. I can’t reach or touch the engraved names, so I take a picture. Harriet Finch, September 28, 1885; Jerry Finch, September 28, 1885; John Pattishall, September 28, 1885; Lee Tyson, September 28, 1885; Henry Jones, January 11, 1899; Ernest Daniels, September 18, 1921.What is missing are the names of their murderers, their ages, the specific circumstances of their deaths. What is missing are the names of their loved ones, left to live in a context where murderers are celebrated and victims are forgotten. The names on the monument demand remembrance. Acknowledgment.I move to the near end of the floating columns to a section that includes placards that document the circumstances of some deaths. Over twenty incidents are cited in which a Black man was murdered because of a white woman.Even a perceived slight...for refusing to run an errand for ______,[allegedly] writing a note to ______,knocking on the front door of ______,asking to marry ______,for frightening ______,for accidentally bumping into ______,for being accused of inappropriate conduct with ______,for performing a wedding between a Black man and ______,for being accused of being threatening toward ______,for walking past a window when ______ was inside bathing,for kissing the hand of ______,for asking for a drink of water from ______,after being wrongly accused of peeping in the window of ______,for carrying a photo of ______ in his hat,for using inappropriate language with ______,for annoying ______,for having ______ as a wife,because _____was found dead,for walking behind ______,for living with ______,for eloping with______.White women are the fill-in-the-blanks of lynching. Lynching deaths are often attributed to the obsessive preservation of whiteness and protection of white womanhood.1 While Black men are the face of lynching, Black women were also lynched and raped,2 often in efforts to protect or defend Black men. White men were the perpetrators of violence, but white women were nearly always implicated, seemingly inspiring the blood thirsty rage of their men.I sit in front of the memorial waterfall to gather my thoughts, my anger. I understand it is important to not only remember, but to memorialize racial terrorism. The waterfall commemorates those who are not documented, acknowledging and honoring unknown and unnamed victims. The unknown and unknowable names of lynching victims are confronted by the unknown and unknowable names of perpetrators and bystanders who either terrorized and tortured Black people, or were spectators for sport. I think of the whitewashed faces of mob members and racist citizens posed next to lynched bodies, defiant and self-satisfied,3 and suddenly cannot distinguish between my sadness and rage—at how the anonymity of lynchings goes both ways. We want to know the victims, but who seeks to expose the murderers? Murderers and others complicit or guilty by association are protected with obscurity, never publicly shamed or held accountable for their crimes. Many stories blame “mobs” for the deaths of Black women and men,4 not individuals who participated as a hate group to commit a hate crime. I decide my internalized curiosity counters the intention of the memorial, which is to remember the murdered dead, not the dead murderers. Racists don’t deserve recognition, but their crimes do warrant their recognizability in history. I wonder how lynching legacies are passed down in white families.I walk past an engraved Toni Morrison quote to reach the perimeter of the site, which is where duplicate weather-worn monuments are housed temporarily, intended to be sent to the home states and counties of the memorialized dead. They are spread out like caskets, laid like bodies barely touching, but everywhere. Here it is easier to find the structures that belong to familiar places. I look for Guilford County, Lee County, and Wake County, North Carolina. I find Hillsborough County, Florida, and Tuscaloosa County, Alabama, the two places I have lived since leaving North Carolina. Living in the South means you are inherently going to live in a place where people died from lynching. The realization is sobering as I imagine the simultaneous terror of racism and comfort of familiarity my ancestors felt, that I feel, living in the South.The trail leads to a memorial grove and “reflection space” named after lynching activist Ida B. Wells,5 but I don’t linger there. I follow the path to pass a sculpture representing Black women who participated in the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The three statues stand in front of the exit path, forcing engagement. Acknowledgment. I linger there, focusing on the maternal bodies of the unidentified statues, touching their stone hands, standing in their bronzed footsteps. Their backs greet you if you turn around while leaving, welcoming you back in. The memorial makes the activist work of Black women visible. I smile thinking about how a sculpture of a Black woman and her child confronts guests as they arrive, and an installment of Black women of all ages meets them as they leave. The memorial is framed by Black women’s unfailing demands for justice. Their framing presence is a reminder that while white women were at the center of lynching, Black women were at the center of activism.Black women have never been afforded protection or luxuries like white women. Contemporary feminism and intersectional identity politics have exposed the reality that Black women experience multiplicative oppressions, while white women are valorized, their presence and absence filling in the blanks of fragile masculinity and enjoying all the so-called luxuries of womanhood. Black women are not erased from this memorial—and that matters.I think of the middle-aged Black woman who escorted her grandchildren through the memorial, holding hands, while her daughter watched and waited. The children were too young to fully grasp the gravity of lynching, but I hope they remember, not just what their grandmother told them, but how the suffering of our ancestors made space for our freedom.As I near the end, the final sculpture shows the head and arms of ten black men with their hands raised, their bodies and some parts buried beneath view.Some chin.Some nose.Some eyes.Some forehead.Some elbow.Some chest.All hands.It is unclear if the image intends to represent them rising or drowning, surviving or dying. Surrendering.An invocation poem is printed on a marble headstone marking the conclusion of the memorial with activist Elizabeth Alexander’s words urging remembrance and reverence. “You will find us here memoried and storied.”You will find us here.* * *Stories help us understand and make sense of the past and present. The Equal Justice Initiative, the organization responsible for the Memorial and Museum, is committed to racial justice and remembering. The Lynching in America website6 features oral histories of lynching, and the inevitable and ongoing impact they have on our lives. In one of the stories, Tarabu Betsarai Kirkland explains that we have to “keep remembering...to confront history,” but we also have to keep remembering to confront the present. The memorial highlights the relationship between slavery, lynching, and the prison industrial complex, but it also draws lines between a corrupt criminal justice system then, and a culpable criminal justice system now. We cannot move forward without reckoning with the past, and our present proves that unreconciled wrongs cannot be made right.The memorial imposes a kind of witness bearing, bearing witness to the ways race has shaped the consciousness and conscience of America. The memorial reminds me that we must keep remembering, and we must keep insisting justice, reconciliation, and restitution are possible.No justice. No peace

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