The Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) has unveiled plans for the Memorial to Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama. Designed in collaboration with Boston-based MASS Design Group, the new memorial is intended to acknowledge victims of lynching throughout American history. EJI also plans to construct a museum, called “From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration,” inside its headquarters—a former slave warehouse in downtown Montgomery—with the goal of tracing racial history in the U.S. from the earliest days of slavery, through the Jim Crow era, to the present day.
Situated on the highest point of Montgomery—the first capital of the Confederacy—the memorial is composed of two parts: one permanent, one mobile. MASS designed a large rectangular pavilion from which 800 6-foot columns will be suspended, representing the counties where lynchings took place. Every column will be inscribed with the names of the individuals killed there. In an adjacent field on the six-acre site, duplicates of the columns will stand until they are claimed by and relocated to the counties they represent as permanent markers and memorials to the victims from those areas.
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