Mukoli

Unexpected Peace

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Over the winter break, I had the wonderful experience of hosting my Goddaughter for 10 days. Can you imagine a globetrotting Harvard junior wanting to spend the second half of her break with her Auntee G? I was giddy with excitement, pride, and a feeling of being special. One of the things she wanted to do during her time was to visit the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, which is only a two-and-a-half-hour drive from my home. She learned about the memorial when Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), spoke at her university. My Goddaughter, a Sociology major, African American Studies minor, and internationally recognized literacy activist was intrigued with Stevenson’s discussion the conception and meaning of the memorial, one of three Legacy Sites that the EJI sponsored with the acquisition of 20 million dollars from private donors and foundations. 

I had planned to visit the memorial in the summer as part of my research for a digital humanities (DH) project. My DH project, Silenced Fruit: The Lynching of Black Women in America, includes a comprehensive digital repository and mapping of the Black women (named and unnamed) who were lynched in America, along with the sites of memorialization, public acknowledgment, and reconciliation for these violent acts against Black women. This project reflects my desire to tell the stories of the silenced, violent, and unjust experiences of Black women in America through my scholarship and teaching. It is a digital space dedicated to truth-telling, reckoning, and reconciliation.  

However, my intellectual serious engagement with the lynching of Black people began when I was introduced to Ida B. Wells-Barnett in a Black women’s writers’ course that a colleague was teaching. I was working full-time as an instructor teaching four sections of first-year composition at a state university and contemplating my next professional move. I learned that my colleague-friend was teaching a course on Black women writers—something I was interested in doing one day—and asked if I could sit in some of her classes. Of course, she said yes. On my first visit to her class, she began by showing the documentary Ida B. Wells: A Passion for Justice. I was mesmerized by the uncompromising activism of this Black woman, born three years before the emancipation of enslaved persons in America. But the details of the injustices and violence made me angry.  

Wells-Barnett, sometimes single-handedly and without fear, challenged segregation, mob violence, the unjust treatment of Black soldiers, the disenfranchisement of Black farmers, and racism in the women’s suffrage movement with her presence and pen. But what stayed with me most was the consequential and direct first line in the assigned reading, “Lynch Law in America”: 

Our country’s national crime is lynching. It is not the creature of an hour, the sudden outburst of uncontrolled fury, or the unspeakable brutality of an insane mob. It represents the cool calculating deliberation of intelligent people who openly avow that there is an unwritten law that justifies them in putting human beings to death without complaint under oath, without trial by jury, without opportunity to make a defense, and without the right to appeal. 

I knew about lynching within the context of southern white supremacists who desired political and economic disenfranchisement and demanded the undeserved respect of Black people in the South with domestic terrorism. There were a few images that appeared in some books, the portrayal of lynching in films, and the stories in African American literature that referenced crime. But Wells-Barnett’s powerfully articulated indictment of “our nation” of the crime of lynching, which is, I would learn, at the core of all her publications about lynching, moved the discourse from one about the racism and violence in the South to one about national accountability, raising the question of national reckoning and reconciliation.  

I teach about lynching through the activism and journalism of Ida B. Wells-Barnett in my literature, Black Studies, and Black feminist studies courses. Like my colleague, I begin the module with the documentary A Passion for Justice to introduce the class discussion about lynching and the work of Ida B. Wells-Barnett. After showing the documentary in class, I give students a few minutes to decompress and then ask each student to share their feelings about the documentary in one word. The most common responses are: ‘speechless’, ‘numb’, ‘surprised’, ‘informed’, ‘aware’, ‘sorrowful’, and ‘anger’.  

I generally require students to read “Lynch Law in America” and/or the first and last chapters of The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States: “The Case Stated” and “The Remedy.” Students appreciate Wells-Barnett’s directness and the clarity with which she analyzes and contextualizes the mob violence inflicted on free Black people after the Emancipation Proclamation ended slavery in America in 1965. Teaching students about the history of lynching in Black communities provides them the opportunity to engage with the implications of consistent, unchecked violence and racism, as well as feigning national ignorance.  

I sometimes show some of the images from Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America – described by its editor and collector James Allen as “a photo document of proof, an unearthing of crimes” – rendered on postcards that were shared through the US postal system. These images, I know, might come off as a bit extreme, and I have had students express their discomfort. However, they are visual evidence of the consistency of violence and horror, community participation, and national complicity that Wells-Barnett writes about. Students may have seen one of the more popular images of lynching or a mocked lynching in a movie, but they were not aware of the frequency and extent of the domestic terror that displayed in the pictorial book. Seeing is a way to experience—experiencing creates feelings—to feel is truly to bear witness—and bearing witness gives rise to empathy. 

On the last Friday of my Goddaughter’s visit, we took a two-and-a-half-hour drive to Montgomery, Alabama. Once we exited I-85 in Montgomery, we had to navigate through a residential area to get to the memorial. When we arrived, we did not see anyone. As we were parking, a park guide walked toward the car. When we exited the car, he told us that the Peace and Justice Memorial Center was closed, but the actual memorial was open. We were not disappointed because it was the actual memorial that we wanted to see. Nonetheless, it did feel a little eerie. 

The enthusiastic gentleman walked us to the entrance area of the memorial, where we paid only $5 and received directions on how to proceed in the memorial park. I recall vividly that going through the tollhouse was like going through a time tunnel, from which we emerged into a garden where the air was crisper, the grass greener, the sky bluer, and the sun brighter.  

We read each plaque that provided an overview of the racial terror Black people experienced, from the Middle Passage to the era of lynching, and took in the beauty and magnitude of the six acres on which the entire memorial park rests. I had not read anything about the memorial, so, other than what my Goddaughter told me, I did not know what to expect. But my mind was fixed on seeing how many women were acknowledged inside the lynching memorial. 

Upon entering the memorial, I came face to face with a set of rusted (what I now know to be Corten) steel cuboid monuments hanging from the ceiling.  Each monument, which appeared to be as tall as me, had a state, county, and the victims’ names with dates of their murder carved on it. I took the time to read them closely and felt a sense of excitement to immediately see several names women who had been lynched. I immediately started taking pictures as I zigzagged forward to do the same. I saw: 

• Colleton County, South Carolina, Hannah Kearse, I know her; she was an elderly lady, 1 of 7 names on the monument. 
• Calhoun County, Georgia, Emma Mike, I’m not familiar with her, 1 of 11 names on the monument. 
• Winston County, Mississippi, Essies Bostic, I don’t know of her either, also 1 of 11 names on the monument.  
• Carroll County, Mississippi, Betsi McCray and Ida McCray, Betsi was lynched alongside her daughter and son, 2 of 29 names on the monument. 

I took a picture of each one of them before looking up and seeing endless rows of monuments, with each row placed higher than the last. I finally looked up, and monuments were hanging in the air from a beam that connected to the other side of the memorial. I looked out into the other side of the garden, where more monuments were resting flat on the ground like rows of coffins. 

I became overwhelmed by what I was seeing. I was unsure whether it was the fact that there was no way I could read all the monuments, or the implications of their endless presence. My Goddaughter saw the anxiety on my face and walked up to me, hugging me. I felt our feelings merge at that point. Her presence was calming as she explained that the monuments are arranged in alphabetical order by state and county, forming a spiral as you progress from one state to the next. Together, we walked to Alabama and began walking from county to county to get a feel for the spiraling order. There were a lot of Alabamas. As we turned the corner, I had to look up to read the inscriptions on the monuments. I told my Goddaughter it was like a mass lynching, with the monuments representing bodies slowly being pulled up and hung from a tree. Though overwhelmed, I did not feel anger. There was some sadness but not anger.  

My father once told me that there were no lynchings in Grady County, the county of my family’s hometown. I wanted to see if that was true. There were a lot of monuments for Georgias, too, but there was not one for Grady County. I also found monuments dedicated to specific women. There were also plaques on the walls about some of the most violent and unusual lynchings. Eleven of them included women and children (named and unnamed). I touched them and smiled. 

The monuments continued to get higher and higher; the space became darker and darker, and the floor began to slope downward. It felt as if we were entering the belly of a slave ship. When we turned another corner, the monuments were so high we had to bend our heads back and look up to see them.   

In the middle of the floor, there was a glass case that contained soil from over two dozen sites of “racial terror lynchings.” It is part of a remembrance project that invites community members to visit lynching sites and gather soil to honor those killed and terrorized by racial violence and injustices. My Goddaughter and I touched the case for a moment in silence in remembrance of all the victims. 

When I looked up, I could see the sun peeping from around the next corner. Together my Goddaughter and I walked forward, turned the corner and exited that part of the memorial into the garden.  Enjoying the crisp air, surrounded by green grass, under the blue sky and bright sun, we walked through a sculpture garden that included more monuments and plaques. We smiled, we hugged, we held hands and shared knowledge about the courageous Black people and events that were honored, recognized, and memorialized in the garden.  

Then, out of nowhere, my Goddaughter said she was hungry and wanted Jamaican food. Her mother is Jamaican. I thought, Jamaican, the soul food of my people on another island in the Black diaspora. My Goddaughter found a Jamaican restaurant in the neighborhood. Perfect. 

Then we come to the final monument before exiting the garden. It is a tall, shiny stone with an “Invocation” by Elizabeth Alexander inscribed on it. The final lines read,  

You will find us here mighty. 
You will find us here extinct. 
You will find us where you left us, but not as you left us but not as you left us. 

Here you endure and are luminous. 
You are not lost to us. 
The wind carries sorrows, signs, and shouts. 

The wind brings everything. Nothing is lost.  

I responded, Ashay, and I felt unexpected peace.  

My Goddaughter and I made our way to the restaurant. We celebrated the lives of all the women, men, and children whose murders were finally recognized and lives honored in the memorial over soul food and laughter.  

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