A flag that, to many, represents the Confederate States of America and the cause for which they fought (though the flag wasn’t ever technically a flag of the Confederacy) has been a subject of much controversy lately. Now many southern states will see a new kind of memorial relating to the Civil War and lives lost — but it won’t be to those Confederate soldiers who died trying to preserve the right to keep slaves. Instead, these memorials will be to those who lost their lives to lynching as the states struggled against the idea of black liberty.
The initiative comes from one Bryan Stevenson, a civil rights attorney who says that the Confederate flag and memorials to Confederate soldiers inspire him to complete his mission. He told the L.A. Times that he hopes to place memorial markers to victims of lynching in southern states, saying these atrocities were carried out sometimes for offenses as minor as playing music too loud. (That sounds like a familiar story , actually.)
Stevenson’s nonprofit, the Equal Justice Initiative, has tracked how many such lynchings occurred, and found nearly 4,000 in the 73-year-period between 1877 and 1950 — that’s more than one per week. It also doesn’t include church burnings or other murders.
Stevenson says that even 150 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, America has failed to truly address the effects of slavery. Now, Confederate memorials only rub salt in the wounds of those who still bear the consequences of racial discrimination.
The Equal Justice Institute has already begun to place memorial markers. You can see one above in Alabama, as Stevenson appeared at its unveiling. This one marks warehouses that were used in slave trade. Two more will appear in Montgomery, recognizing other sites central to the slave trade and to the institution of slavery.
Stevenson believes that until the nation looks the past in the eye and directly addresses it, openly and honestly, the southern states will never be able to move past their Confederate phase, and equality and reconciliation will never be possible.
Placing a new kind of memorial in Confederate states, memorials to those who were murdered for the color of their skin, isn’t Bryan Stevenson’s only project. The Equal Justice Institute has a hand in a number of causes : ending the imprisonment of children as adults, abolishing the death penalty, and reforming systems that imprison black citizens at a rate frighteningly higher than that of white citizens, are just a few of those.
Still, the memorial project is one that can be expected to draw a lot of eyes to the group. Stevenson says there have been threats. It hasn’t deterred him from his mission to place monuments across the Confederate states, though, reminding the populace that it wasn’t only Confederate soldiers who died, and reminding people exactly what that fight was for.
[Photo via: Equal Justice Institute]
