This Boston-designed memorial to lynching victims fights the shameful legacy of racist Confederate statues.
In a time when a college town in Charlottesville, Virginia has brought the strife surrounding racial injustice and the rise of white supremacy to the forefront in America’s consciousness, a design group in Massachusetts is trying to be part of the solution. MASS Design Group in Boston is collaborating with the Equal Justice Initiative to create a memorial to peace and justice confronting the country’s shameful history of lynching head-on.
MASS Design Group is no stranger to this kind of truth-telling memorial. The company designed the Kigali Genocide Memorial, dedicated to the more than 250,000 Tutsi slaughtered in Rwanda. The memorial to victims of lynching, scheduled to open in 2018, will include the names of the over 4,000 black men, women, and children who were hanged, burned alive, shot, drowned, and beaten to death by white mobs between 1877 and 1950.
Located on six acres overlooking the city of Montgomery, the memorial will include 800 columns—one for each county in which EJI has documented that lynchings occurred. But the memorial will be more than simply a static space. A correlating group of 800 columns will be placed outside the memorial. The intent, states EJI on its website, is to invite “each of these counties to retrieve their county’s monument and place it back in the county where the terror lynchings took place.” And some of those counties may not want to retrieve their monument . . . a choice that will be its own statement.