A memorial to honor victims of lynching is set to open next year in Montgomery, Alabama, a legal rights organization announced Tuesday.
The nonprofit Equal Justice Initiative announced the Memorial to Peace and Justice to honor thousands of victims of racial terror lynching and help the United States own up to its history of slavery, CBS News reported.
"I think it's important because when you do that, you change your identity," EJI founder and executive director Bryan Stevenson said. "You change your relationship to these histories of mass atrocities and violence. But when you don't do that, things linger. The smog created by that history of racial inequality continues to compromise our health. And in this country, we haven't done that about slavery. About lynching. About segregation."
EJI is also planning a museum called "From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration," tracing the country's racial history in connection with the memorial, The New York Times reported.
"Our goal isn’t to be divisive," Stevenson told the Times. "Our goal is just to get people to confront the truth of our past with some more courage."
The $20 million project has attracted contributions from groups including the Ford Foundation and Google.
The project will include a four-sided gallery of 801 suspended six-foot columns with the names of lynching victims. Duplicate columns will be placed in a field, where visitors can retrieve them and place them as markers in their home counties, the Times said.
According to EJI, more than 4,000 lynchings occurred between 1877 and 1950, AL.com reported.
Twitter users shared mixed reactions, but most seemed supportive of the idea.
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