Imagine riding through the South, and seeing memorial markers at lynching sites. It’s only 4000. Bryan Stevenson is a Harvard educated lawyer, and grandson of a slave. Bryan feels the markers will be symbols of civil rights. Don’t Forget: Black men, women, and children were strung from trees, and hanged from telephone poles. In most cases, the offense was as trivial as playing music too loud, or not tipping his hat to a white man. The markers would represent a new memorial.
Just as the Confederate Flag is a tribute to those who fought and died for the right to hold blacks in slavery, these markers will indicate each spot where a person was murdered by lynching. Can Southerners handle being reminded of their haunting racist past? Bryan Stevenson did elaborate research with his non-profit Equal Justice Initiative.
According to it’s report, America’s lynching era occurred most in Georgia and Mississippi. Florida, Alabama, and Arkansas lynched anything nappy. Knocking on a white woman’s door, refusing to remove your World War II uniform, accidentally bumping into a white chic- would get a ninja lynched. Most killings became a public carnival to instill fear #ICantBreathe.
“There’s still this presumption of guilt assigned to African Americans from people inherently worried about the dangerousness and criminality of black men,” Stevenson told LATimes. “It’s a burden. The police have menaced, threatened and followed us all our lives.”
While Germany used public dialogue to come to terms with its Holocaust legacy, Stevenson says, “In America, we do just the opposite…. We don’t want to talk about it; we don’t even want to think about it.”
What do you think? Are memorial markers necessary to remind everybody America kidnapped Africans from their homeland, forced them to plank on ships funded by corporate big-wigs, and worked them as slaves for 400 years?
