Why I Visited a “Horrible” Place

 

 

 

I expected to feel horror.  

Yes, there was a little of that.  But to enter the National Memorial for Peace and Justice was to walk into a sanctuary of sorts.    

From the moment we passed through airport-style security, the atmosphere was hushed and reverent.  Visitors were coached about photography restrictions and told where water and restrooms were.  

We began a long walk, past bronze statues of slaves in chains, naked, awaiting the auction block – which over a century ago was only a few blocks from this now-green hillside memorial.  A mother with babe in arms, reaching for her husband, who was chained a few feet away to be sold down the river.  

On this bright blue day, the harsh realities of being black stand in front of us.  On the wall are historical facts about the racial terror lynchings that followed the freeing of the slaves over a period of close to a hundred years.  Here, in the United States of America.

A former president used the term “Shock and Awe” as a war tactic.  That pretty well fits how I felt as I experienced the long path up the hill to the memorial.  Shock.  Awe. 

Then we entered the open-sided building itself.  We met huge coffin size blocks of corten steel, suspended from above, at eye level. Each contains a county and state name.  Below that are the names of people known to have been lynched in that county and state, and the date they were killed.  

It is a little like entering a cemetery.  Except that all the names are of murder victims.  And all the victims were black.   

My sense of awe continued, and as we made our way around the steel monuments, I saw the names of four people who died on the same day.  They had the same last name.  An entire family was lynched together. 

I was alternating between sorrow, horror, and dismay.  How can humans do this to each other?  and why?

Gradually, the monuments above me were higher.  I had to look up to see the counties and the names.  The monuments were hanging.  Just as many of the lynching victims were.  

Along the walls, short stories tell of individuals who were lynched and for what (drinking from a white man’s well; talking to a white woman).  Some were lynched because they were the family of a man accused who could not be found at that moment.   

In the center of the four sided structure, which contains more than 800 individual monuments, I entered a large green courtyard, with the peak of the hill at its center.   I walked to the highest point, overlooking the city of Montgomery.  There I came to a square wooden platform and a plaque describing a frequent scene at a lynching – the accused was taken to a hanging platform, with a crowd surrounding him or her.  The high point, the wooden platform, the surrounding crowd – those images were someone’s last visions before death.  

So much sorrow.  So much injustice.  So much legacy of terror.  There finally my shock and awe spilled over into tears.   

The brilliant blue September sky over a peaceful Montgomery became filled with a crazed and hateful crowd calling for a death.  For a moment, that death was mine and I could feel the terror and the outrage. 

Then I walked down the hillside, still alive, still safe.   

I returned to the memorials suspended above me.  I took in the flowing water over the wall.  I saw the glass covered table filled with earth taken from many sites where lynchings have occurred.  I read the tribute to the many unknown lynching victims that will never be identified.  

I walked through the identical monuments, laid like coffins, that are twins to the hanging ones, with identical counties, states, and named victims.  Their purpose?  To be given to the counties where the lynchings occurred, to be acknowledged and claimed.   Is there one for my county? 

Yes, there is.  

So, I have friends who ask, “Why go there?  What purpose does it serve?  Why does it matter now!  It’s over and a long time ago.”  Or, “It’s horrible.  I don’t want to think about it.”

I went there not for reasons of logic, but for reasons of soul.  And Spirit.  In this challenging time we live in, I feel deeply called to stretch my heart, to expand.  To love more, even when I don’t feel like it.  To be able to presence pain and sorrow and injustice.  To sit with grief when called upon to do so.   

That’s why I went.  To sit with grief.  To be present to sorrow and injustice.  To acknowledge the ancestral traumas that racial lynching created that still affect all of us today.  

I took photos inside the memorial with my iPhone and with my Canon Powershot.  My iPhone reliably adjusted to the light and dark and captured pretty good snapshots.  When I got home and loaded the Powershot (RAW) images into Lightroom for processing, I was dismayed to see spots all over the best shot I took inside the memorial.  What!?  I foolishly forgot to wipe the rain spots off my camera lens and spoiled the best shots.  I was upset. 

Then a couple of days went by.  Looking at all the photos, I realized it had not rained that day at all – brilliant blue sky.  I had not used that camera until that moment on the trip.  There were no rain spots. 

So it must have been dust.  But the same location taken with my iPhone is clear.  There’s no dust.  And further along in the memorial, my Powershot has no dust spots at all. 

The iPhone photos of the monuments glow with light.  When I look at the photo I feel a presence of Light.  The Powershot photo is filled with what many people call orbs.  Filled with them.  I cannot explain that.  Except both accurately portray the sense of Light and Angels that I felt in the Memorial.

A favorite passage of mine from A Course in Miracles says, “The blood of hatred fades to let the grass grow green again, and let the flowers be all white and sparkling in the summer sun.  What was a place of death has now become a living temple in a world of light…. The holiest of all the spots on earth is where an ancient hatred has become a present love.”   

My soul sent me to the Memorial.  I’m beginning to understand why.