Last Thursday the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, better known as the lynching memorial, opened to wide coverage and effusive praise from all quarters — well, almost all quarters.
The memorial stands in Montgomery, Alabama, near the former site of the city’s slave auction. Montgomery also is home to the Equal Justice Initiative, founded by attorney Bryan Stevenson. His nonprofit, which he started in 1994 to represent wrongly convicted prisoners, has grown to handle cases for poor prisoners and guarantees to defend anyone in a death penalty case in the state, which has the most per capita in the country.
I met Stevenson, who was raised in Milton and graduated from Cape Henlopen High in 1977, a decade or so ago when he spoke at our church. He is an amazing man, not only incredibly intelligent but entirely without malice, perhaps the most placid person I’ve ever met. He has suffered the usual share of indignities heaped on any African American, especially in Alabama, where he moved to practice law after attending Harvard Law on a full scholarship (he also earned a Masters from the Kennedy School of Government while he was at it; he’s that smart). Yet he expresses no trace of resentment, only compassion even for the racists he encounters. Even for someone with a religious upbringing who did his undergraduate work at a theological seminary, his humility and empathy are transcendent.
The memorial got wide exposure two weeks ago with a segment on “60 Minutes” in which Stevenson was interviewed by Oprah Winfrey. I’m not sure if anything appeared in the News Journal, but Delmarva Now ran a locally written Sunday story.
Stevenson has earned many accolades over the years, but I think this is going to propel him to another level. This memorial has a visual and emotional impact to rival the Vietnam Memorial in Washington. It consists of more than 800 blocks of steel — one for every county in which EJI could document at least one lynching — hung from the ceiling and engraved with the names, where known, of the 4,400 victims. Two of Delaware’s three counties are included. Sussex is not one of them.