Bryan Stevenson and EJI Open Memorial and Museum
Bryan Stevenson and the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), of which he is the founder and Executive Director, have opened the Legacy Museum and The National Memorial for Peace and Justice.
Learn more about the museum and memorial on the EJI website.
Mr. Stevenson and EJI have been featured and celebrated by several media outlets and he is receiving an honorary degree from NYU this year. Featured below are only a few of the stories that have been published about his work and the new museum and memorial.
Mr. Stevenson appeared on 60 Minutes, interviewed by Oprah Winfrey:
Stevenson's team started their investigation in Alabama, but soon uncovered accounts of mobs murdering African-Americans throughout the southern states, and beyond.
As the cases mounted, Stevenson wanted to do something to commemorate the victims.
So in Montgomery, Alabama, the heart of the deep south – which still has dozens of monuments celebrating the Confederacy – Stevenson's equal justice initiative took on a bold project: they bought six acres of land and started construction on a memorial to the victims of lynching.
Watch the full feature online now.
The opening of The National Memorial for Peace and Justice was featured in the New York Times article “A Lynching Memorial Is Opening. The Country Has Never Seen Anything Like It.” The article features descriptions and images from the memorial:
The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which opens Thursday on a six-acre site overlooking the Alabama State Capitol, is dedicated to the victims of American white supremacy. And it demands a reckoning with one of the nation’s least recognized atrocities: the lynching of thousands of black people in a decades-long campaign of racist terror.
At the center is a grim cloister, a walkway with 800 weathered steel columns, all hanging from a roof. Etched on each column is the name of an American county and the people who were lynched there, most listed by name, many simply as “unknown.” The columns meet you first at eye level, like the headstones that lynching victims were rarely given. But as you walk, the floor steadily descends; by the end, the columns are all dangling above, leaving you in the position of the callous spectators in old photographs of public lynchings.
The Washington Post’s podcast “Cape Up” interviewed Mr. Stevenson in the episode “Bryan Stevenson wants us to confront our country’s racial terrorism and then say, ‘Never again’” Mr. Stevenson describes the horror that the victims suffered, the participation by the community, and why these acts were terrorism. He says that the legacy is quite tragic. “Accountability for me is at the heart of what we’re trying to do. … We have to talk about it. We have to acknowledge the wrongfulness of it. I think we would benefit as a society if we expressed our shame about it.”
ALI is proud to welcome Mr. Stevenson as our lunch speaker on Wednesday, May 23, at this year’s Annual Meeting.
