National Memorial for Peace and Justice

The Equal Justice Initiative is building a national memorial to victims of lynching in Montgomery, Alabama, opened in 2018. This memorial project relating to America’s history of racial terror and lynching will become the most ambitious in the nation on this topic. A classical structure was designed for the memorial, consisting of 805 columns – one for each county where EJI documented racial terror lynchings. When visitors enter the memorial, the ground drops and perception shifts as visitors realize that the columns that appeared to be holding up the structure are actually monuments suspended from above, which evoke the lynchings that took place in the public square. Over 4,000 names of lynching victims will be inscribed on these monuments.