There is a haunting sense of calm at the Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama. Better known as the National Lynching memorial, the space opened on April 26 as a project of the Equal Justice Initiative, a nonprofit that provides legal support to those unjustly persecuted in the criminal justice system. EJI spent just over 3 years and $15 million dollars to create the 8,400-square-foot museum and memorial, which is dedicated to the more than 4,400 victims of racial violence between 1877 and 1950 in the United States.
It is a space that takes an almost unimaginably difficult topic—the individual horror of lynching—and challenges its visitors to engage with it, to put lynching in its rightful context as a tool of racial terror throughout this country’s history. It is easy to be struck by the emotional gravity of it all. It is much harder to rationalize the depth of cruelty it requires to commit and allow such atrocities.
Architecture should, but rarely does grapple with these issues; because of this, I’ve spent my career in architecture—as a designer and as an advocate for Design Justice—working, researching, and challenging the many ways in which privilege and power structures use architecture as a means to perpetuate injustice in the built environment. The EJI memorial, which I toured recently, offers a revealing counterexample: how design can function as protest.
[For more on this story by BRYAN LEE JR., go to https://www.citylab.com/design...-of-lynching/560450/]
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