Sunday as I was driving, I heard a radio piece via “On the Media” with Brooke Gladstone, discussing the work of lawyer Bryan Stephenson. I knew I was in for a treat because I’d heard Bryan Stephenson before and considered him one of the most impressive African-American activists I’d ever come across. I’d seen his powerful National Memorial for Peace and Justicein a Newshour report when it opened, and knew of that too. But I’d never heard the specific take I was hearing in this “On the Media” segment—finding out only online that it was called “The Worst Thing We’ve Ever Done,” a phrase that comes from Stephenson’s idea that people are not the same as, and cannot be identified with ‘the worst thing they’ve ever done.’ He uses this principle in his law practice, which often consists of defending black teenagers, 13- and 14-year-olds who are condemned, in his home state of Alabama, to life in prison for crimes committed when they are children. Stephenson’s general point is that no one can be forever identified and judged by a single act done in a single moment. His Equal Justice Initiativetakes a similar stand, arguing that the incarceration of so many Black young men—the figures are horrifying, amounting to huge percentages of young Black men who are either in prison (incarcerated at 5 times the rate of whites), or on parole far beyond their representation in the population as a whole—equates to a continuing miscarriage of justice that essentially extends slavery to our present day. And that constitutes his other major argument: while most Americans think that the original crime of slavery ended in America with the Civil War, in actual fact, the racist war against ‘freed’ slaves simply continued in another form—especially the constant lynching that Stephenson specifically labels “terrorism.” And one of the points he makes is that it was not only poor black men who were terrorized by lynching; often it was freedmen and women who had become economically successful, a sin against white power almost as great, in white post-Civil War America, as eyeing a white woman.
But to get to the real point of Stephenson’s ideas in “The Worst Thing We’ve Ever Done,” what he has been arguing all along is that Americans have never come to terms with the outrages against African Americans not only of slavery, but of the more than 4,000 lynchings (Stephenson emphasizes repeatedly that this was literal ‘terrorism,’ long before 9/11) that continued those outrages virtually to the 1950s (and continue today in mass incarceration). Indeed, Stephenson repeatedly maintains that slavery, horrible as it was, wasn’t the most egregious crime against African-Americans. The most long-lasting crime (one that, as anyone can easily see, is continuing and given encouragement by the current President of the United States) was the notion that was used to justify it, both pre- and post-Civil War. This was the notion that Whites were simply following nature in enslaving Blacks, that Whites were naturally superior, and that Blacks could never—freed or not—be considered equal and hence deserving of equal rights, equal opportunities, or equal justice. What this means is that America itself has never, not ever, come to terms with its past—especially when compared to apartheid South Africa, or Germany regarding its Nazi era. To make this point, Gladstone in her radio segment interviews several current residents of Germany, and they highlight the numerous monuments erected in Germany to memorialize and constantly remind Germans of the extermination of Jews in the Nazi death camps. One such reminder is the Holocaust Memorial that sits smack in the center of Berlin near the Brandenburg Gate—making it impossible for any German to ignore what took place. This reminder of and confrontation with the past—and thereby its acknowledgment—simply cannot be avoided by modern Germans, and thus makes it almost impossible to deny (though some neo-Nazis these days have been trying.)
Comparing this German example to the situation in the United States then becomes deeply instructive. In the American South, for example, monuments to Civil War “heroes” are everywhere, including Stephenson’s hometown of Montgomery, Alabama. Civil War generals are everywhere memorialized and spoken of with reverence. Families take great pride in the deeds of ancestors who “fought the good fight” for the “noble cause.” This would simply be unthinkable—to publicly and proudly idealize Hitler or Eichmann or Goebbels—in Germany. And yet heroic statues of confederate General Robert E. Lee are found throughout the American South (it is no accident that the one in Charlottesville VA became the center of the white supremacist riots there in 2017). In Montgomery, the most active slave-trading port in the South, there are many such markers, including the “first White House of the Confederacy where Jefferson Davis lived until 1861” (“A Visit to Montgomery’s Legacy Museum,” TheNew Yorker: July 17, 2018.)
This is precisely what Bryan Stephenson and his EJI (Equal Justice Initiative) set about to remedy with his Legacy Museumand National Memorial for Peace and Justicein Montgomery. The Memorial has been covered in several pieces, including the above-mentioned one in The New Yorker. It is a powerful piece of symbolism that makes vivid, on steel slabs hanging from the ceiling, 816 of the more than 4,000 lynchings Stephenson and his team have found and documented. The viewer, as Brooke Gladstone testifies in her piece, has to look up, as he or she would have to look upward to see a black body lynched in a tree. To further emphasize the lynchings, Stephenson has placed in the Legacy Museum(itself sited in a warehouse formerly used as a slave market) small Mason jars filled with soil taken from the site of single lynchings throughout the South and beyond. Each jar is labeled with the name of the victim, the date of death, and the county where the lynching took place. Some jars are accompanied by related videos: John Hartfield, accused of assaulting a white woman, was captured and kept alive by a doctor until, on June 26, 1919, 10,000 people from Ellisville, Mississippi could gather in a festive crowd to watch him be hanged, have his dead body riddled with 2,000 bullets, and then burned, while jubilant spectators passed around his severed fingers. The intention of the soil jars is to persuade (or shame) each community to place a monument to memorialize this dark part of its past, for only by doing so, according to Stephenson, can the United States as a whole begin the process of acknowledging and coming to terms with the original sins of its long-denied past. Only in this way can some sort of reconciliation and truth begin the process of national healing, the process of “liberation” as Stephenson puts it.
Only in this way, in short, can the false notion that slavery was merely the South’s ‘peculiar institution,’ a necessary and justified economic option for an agricultural South that a ‘noble’ war tried to preserve, be repudiated. Only in this way can the never-abandoned ideology of ‘white supremacy’—the real ‘toxin’ that has poisoned our nation, according to Stephenson—be buried once and for all. Only in this way can the people of the United States come to terms with the truth about the persistence of this ideology, with the underlying racism that not only allowed slavery to take hold in the South, but also allowed thousands of lynchings to erupt in the Jim Crow era that followed ‘emancipation’ and persist virtually to the present day. Indeed, if there is something “exceptional” about this nation that Americans may rightly claim, this may be it. For as the crusading Black journalist Ida B. Wells wrote in a speech in 1909:
No other nation, civilized or savage, burns its criminals. Only under the stars and stripes is the human Holocaust possible.(cited by Terry Gross on Fresh Air, May 4, 2018).
To be sure, no American with even a rudimentary moral sense would want to claim such a legacy. For precisely that reason, it is something every American should hear about in detail, hear about and face and internalize in such a way that the poisonous crime of white supremacy underlying it might be extirpated without reserve, forever. With his graphic Memorial and Museum, that is precisely what Bryan Stephenson is trying to get all of America to face in its full depth and horror. God knows it is about time.
Lawrence DiStasi
for reference:
Dec. 28, 2018 On the Media: “The Worst Thing We’ve Ever Done.”
Bryan Stephenson TED talk: “We Need to talk about an Injustice,” Mar. 4, 2014.
Allyson Hobbs and Nell Freudenberger, “A Visit to Montgomery’s Legacy Museum,” The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/personal-history/a-visit-to-montgomerys-legacy-museum
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