New Museum Connects History of Slavery to Mass Incarceration – Next City

/montgomery-museum-slavery-lynching-vict

  • New Museum Connects History of Slavery to Mass Incarceration – Next City

    https://nextcity.org/daily/entry/montgomery-museum-slavery-lynching-victim-memorial

    A new museum in Montgomery, Alabama, will connect the history of African-American enslavement in the U.S. to modern-day issues of mass incarceration and police violence. The Equal Justice Initiative, which litigates on behalf of prisoners denied fair and equal treatment, also unveiled designs for the nation’s first memorial to commemorate the victims of lynching, a design that seeks to spread awareness beyond its own walls.

    Last year the nonprofit released a report documenting more than 4,000 lynchings of black people in the U.S. between 1877 and 1950. At the memorial, their names will be engraved on over 800 concrete columns representing each county where lynchings took place. According to a rendering, from a distance, the memorial looks like any other classical structure: rows of columns supporting a square building with a central plaza. But the columns are in fact floating, hanging from the ceiling, in a visceral invocation of lynching’s terror. As a visitor walks around the square, the floor drops farther and farther. In the center of the building’s plaza is a hill, where, according to an accompanying video, “as we stand upon it, the experience of the gallows is inverted and the living stand in judgment by the dead.”

    #esclavage #racisme #états_unis #musées #alabama