Say Their Names

Designing the memory of terror, negotiating national memory: The National September 11 Memorial and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice

“…The Peace and Justice Memorial deploys the vocabulary of modernism to embody those killed by lynching and to quantify their numbers (Figure 2). Sitting on top of a hill above downtown Montgomery, the memorial, designed by MASS Design Group in collaboration with EJI, consists of 816 Corten steel columns that hang from a pavilion roof arranged on a slowly descending walkway (Pasnik et al, 2019). Designed to be walked through and then under, the hanging steel markers are inscribed with the names (some are anonymous) of those lynched in particular counties-this chronicles 4075 lynchings in 12 states from 1877 to 1950 that the Equal Justice Initiative (2017) has been able to determine through research so far.…”

“…Working in the heart of the racist criminal justice system of Alabama, EJI and Stevenson (2014) came to understand that their legal project could only go so far without a broader change in the culture of the United States and its telling of US history. They pursued a number of memory projects that culminated in the National Memorial for Peace and Justice and the Legacy Museum, which both opened in 2018 (Hasian and Paliewicz, 2021; Pierce and Heitz, 2020). Lynchings were an appallingly effective means to terrorize whole populations in the South, deploying the spectacle of death to instill fear in all Blacks.…”

Power, Discrimination, and Privilege in Individuals and Institutions

“…The May 25th murder in 2020 of Mr. George Floyd, a 46-yearold unarmed Black man, by a White police officer, Derek Chauvin, is but one example of a Black man deemed a threat significant enough by the white world to merit being cut down with lifeending violence at the hands of official representatives of that white world referred to by Baldwin (1962/2021); Floyd lost his life while handcuffed as the now former police officer Chauvin knelt on Floyd's neck for nearly 10 min (Moody-Ramirez et al, 2021). Beyond Mr. Floyd, as a visit to "The Legacy Museum: From Slavery to Mass Incarceration" in Montgomery, Alabama (Pierce and Heitz, 2020) captures, there are voluminous recent and less remembered examples of Black men deemed threats to United States society's White mainstream (Whitestream) and cut down by White violence for refusing to accept the white world's definitions (Baldwin, 1962(Baldwin, /2021. To say the names of only six other Black men also who likewise have more recently gained unwanted membership in this race-based group built on White violence (Cottman et al, 2023): Ahmaud Arbery, Daunte Wright, Jordan Neely, Tamir Rice, Trayvon Martin, and Jawan Dallas (Nicholson et al, 2009;Weissinger et al, 2017).…”

Actual and symbolic prisons, Black men, and the freedom-unfreedom paradox: interrogating the bad faith of racialized oppression in a post-accountable United States

“…Beyond Mr. Floyd, as a visit to “The Legacy Museum: From Slavery to Mass Incarceration” in Montgomery, Alabama ( Pierce and Heitz, 2020 ) captures, there are voluminous recent and less remembered examples of Black men deemed threats to United States society’s White mainstream (Whitestream) and cut down by White violence for refusing to accept the white world’s definitions ( Baldwin, 1962/2021 ). To say the names of only six other Black men also who likewise have more recently gained unwanted membership in this race-based group built on White violence ( Cottman et al, 2023 ): Ahmaud Arbery, Daunte Wright, Jordan Neely, Tamir Rice, Trayvon Martin, and Jawan Dallas ( Nicholson et al, 2009 ; Weissinger et al, 2017 ).…”