"“The way we navigate that history is by not flinching,” says Michael Brune, Sierra Club’s executive director. “It is true that there were a lot of individuals who were white supremacists or eugenicists or who were making racist comments who were part of the beginning of the conservation movement, or who fought successfully to create national parks. So it’s important to understand our history as a movement, and, as a country, learn from it.”
What does that look like, though? At least part of it should look like what the Equal Justice Initiative’s Bryan Stevenson is planning to build in Montgomery, Alabama. Called the Memorial to Peace and Justice, it is actually a reminder of the history of lynching in the U.S. The blueprint calls for a six-acre lot that will hold roughly 800 dangling columns, each representing counties where lynchings of African Americans took place, with the names of the lynched inscribed on each of them. Representatives of those lynching locations are expected to take duplicates of the columns back to their home counties for public display, to remind residents of the racial terrorism that occurred on their soil.
“I continue to believe that we’re not free in this country, that we’re not free at birth by a history of racial injustice,” Stevenson told an audience about the memorial, according to a profile of the project recently published in The New Yorker. “And there are spaces that are occupied by the legacy of that history that weigh on us.”
I had a viscerally negative reaction to this particular suggestion, realizing it's partially because - in my head - it I'm at a park I am surrounded by white people and I have to be having my reaction for their consumption.
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