Thank you Bryan Stevenson for bringing us the history of lynchings. Saying, 'Never again,' can strengthen people. While many were taught to put that experience behind them, you may be creating a path for healing. Could generations of this pain be the cause for so much lack of self-esteem in some people/families?

Does anyone know whether Bryan and the EJI are working on 13th Amendment issues pertaining to the unconstitutional enslavement of undocumented immigrants who are being detained indefinitely in for-profit prisons and forced to work for slave wages despite not having been "duly convicted" of a crime as required by the U.S. Constitution?

"what we didn't expect were the hundreds of calls that we got from white southerners who talked about family members who would brag about having been involved in a lynching; white southerners who remembered being taken as children to the sites of this brutality and how it's haunted them..."

"Black people were thought of as game. I mean that commodification of African Americans that takes place during slavery--you're not human, you're something else....There's this inability to see the humanity of people because of their color; and, posing with these battered bodies was like posing with the big fish you caught [or] the game you slaughtered. And carving up part of that as a totem of your accomplishment, your achievement in taking the life of a black person just speaks to this horrific bigotry, this horrific disease that has so infected our Nation. And, it's why I think that it's necessary for there to be treatment."

“90% of the African American population at the beginning of the 20th century lived in the deep South. What they knew was agriculture; what they knew were the skills and trades that were associated with an agrarian economy. So this region (i.e., the deep South) offered them the best opportunities to develop and take the skills they had developed during enslavement and turn them into jobs [and] ways to support their families. They were holding on to that...and it was only after being threatened and menaced and terrorized that black people fled. And they went to Cleveland and Chicago and Detroit and Los Angeles and Oakland--not as immigrants seeking new economic opportunities--but they went there as refugees and exiles from terror.”

“They were promised freedom after emancipation, but what they got was terror and lynching. They were promised security and what they got was segregation and apartheid and humiliation. And, then they were promised equality, but what they got was mass incarceration.”

"you take that ticket and you go into the apartheid museum, or you can go back where you came from and you can tell people you were unwilling to confront the legacy of apartheid."   HAM!!

We haven’t created spaces in this country that tell the history of the racial inequality of slavery, of lynching, of segregation that motivate people to say “never again.”  And because we’ve never made that commitment, we keep replicating, institutionalizing and introducing new forms of bigotry and discrimination…. Most people don’t have a visual of slavery that upsets them; they don’t ‘have an optic of people who were enslaved that exposes the brutality of it….people actually debate whether black people were better off during slavery, still. Michelle Obama gave a talk…about living in a house built by slaves (which is a fact in the historical record) [and] she was attacked for it….and that phenomenon is a consequence of our cultural complicity and not educating people about the brutality of it

Bryan Stevenson, executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, discusses the opening of the Legacy Museum and National Memorial for Peace and Justice (aka, the lynching memorial). He talks about confronting racial terrorism in America and what we need to do to end it.

Comments

dialectical integrities

dialectical integrities

dialectical integrities

dialectical integrities

dialectical integrities

dialectical integrities

dialectical integrities

mannysauntj