{"id":499,"date":"2025-11-23T03:19:59","date_gmt":"2025-11-23T03:19:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/omp.space\/?p=499"},"modified":"2025-12-18T16:35:50","modified_gmt":"2025-12-18T16:35:50","slug":"montgomery-my-planned-end","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/omp.space\/index.php\/2025\/11\/23\/montgomery-my-planned-end\/","title":{"rendered":"Montgomery – My Planned End"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I arrived in Montgomery exhausted. I had seen so much at such an emotional pitch from Room 306 at the Lorraine Motel to Emmett Till\u2019s unpublished image as well as Civil War photographs and repeated Civil Rights images. I was a wreck. But I had promised myself that Montgomery would be the terminus of my first tour.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At Roger Williams University, I had the honor of counting Julian Bonder a colleague as well as the joy of calling him a friend. On a trip to France, I detoured to Nantes, to experience the Memorial to the Abolition of Slavery, which he had designed with his professional partner Krzysztof Wodiczko. Nantes had been the primary port for the French slave trade. The plaza leading to the entrance encases glass bricks with incised names of the approximately 1700 ships\u2019 names and voyaging dates. The memorial is both the plaza above and, descending a staircase, the undersides of the quayside where ships once tied up. The ocean and the river slap at the pilings as you view the maps and images and read the text panels mounted against the embankment. You are below the plaza. The memorial is globally encompassing both in space and in time from earliest examples of slavery and the transatlantic slave trade to the Declaration of Human Rights and current examples of today\u2019s human trafficking. The relentless sound of the water, sometimes gentle, sometimes slapping with force, gives a sense of the endlessness of the slave enterprise. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Montgomery had been my terminus because I wanted to experience the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. Built by the Equal Justice Institute, it is one of three of their sites in Montgomery to memorialize the brutality against Black Americans, tell the full and constant story of injustice against Black Americans, and also to celebrate all the cultures that have been oppressed, marginalized, and brutalized through the founding of this country and the work to make the project: All Men Created Equal a reality. I am optimistic despite my current dread. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice memorializes the more than 4,000 known lynchings in over 800 counties between 1877 and 1950. The dates start with the end of Reconstruction and end with a significant decline because of social changes and the beginning of the Civil Rights movement (although lynchings continued, as with Emmett Till in 1955). Lynching purposefully terrorized the Black population , enforced Jim Crow, and made white supremacy its core. The memorial stands on a hill, at the edge of a residential area, and overlooks a business district, with the new Greyhound Bus station, and on to the Alabama River. It is a double monument. The main section is an open-sided building around a courtyard, built so that you walk up to it and when inside, proceed down the hill in a spiral. Inside the shed, that reminds me of a tobacco barn, hang stellas made of Corten, a steel designed to rust to make a preservative layer. It\u2019s a popular material for bridges and for sculptors, like Richard Serra, as the patina protects against any further corrosion. Each stella represents a county, named, along with the dates and names, if known, of the lynching in that county. Each stella is a rectangular box, like a coffin. The base of each stella is at the same height. At the entry, they are touching the ground but as you proceed down and through the monument, they hang higher and higher above your head. In the base are the county and state names. Outside the memorial building, the stellas are repeated. This time, lying on the ground with the county, state, and incised names of victims uppermost. This display of replica rectangles is expected to be temporary as the counties named can claim their own stella when they take actions to acknowledge the history of their community and memorialize those murdered. The memorial was as moving as I had expected, but the point where my knees almost buckled was when the staff pointed out I was standing under the name of the last person memorialized \u2014 Decatur County, Georgia, Hollis Riles, 09.02.1949.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I arrived in Montgomery exhausted. I had seen so much at such an emotional pitch from Room 306 at the Lorraine Motel to Emmett Till\u2019s unpublished image as well as Civil War photographs and repeated Civil Rights images. I was a wreck. But I had promised myself that Montgomery would be the terminus of my […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-499","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","category-history"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/omp.space\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/499","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/omp.space\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/omp.space\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/omp.space\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/omp.space\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=499"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/omp.space\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/499\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":509,"href":"https:\/\/omp.space\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/499\/revisions\/509"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/omp.space\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=499"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/omp.space\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=499"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/omp.space\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=499"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}