Today, April 26th, a new museum and memorial is opening in Montgomery, Alabama, on a site where enslaved people were once warehoused. It is a project of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) and the museum and memorial are dedicated to the memory of more than 4400 victims of racial lynchings between 1877 and 1950.
But why build a lynching memorial? EJI believes that publicly confronting the truth about our history is the first step towards recovery and reconciliation. A history of racial injustice must be acknowledged, and mass atrocities and abuse must be recognized and remembered, before a society can recover from mass violence.
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