The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, in memory of the victims of America’s racial terror lynchings. Montgomery, Alabama. 
True peace is not merely the absence of tension, it is the presence of justice.
National Memorial to the victims of lynchings. Montgomery, Alabama.
Tablets to the victims of racial terror lynchings, by county.
Shelby, County, Tennessee.
Hanging from above, as if from a tree, monuments to the victim of lynchings.
Forcing us to look up, as if at a lifeless body.
Caddo Parish, Louisiana.
Lynched for voting.
Lynched for organizing local sharecroppers.
Both 14.
Lynched for testifying against a white man accused of raping a black woman.
Sunflower County, Mississippi.
Strange fruit.
15 year old boy, burned alive by a white mob of more than 1,000.
Hinds County, Mississippi.
Lynched after he was accused of vagrancy.
Lynched after he was acquitted.
Tulsa County, Oklahoma massacre,5/31-6/1 1921.
For the hanged and beaten, for the shot, drowned and burned... for those abandoned by the rule of law, we will remember.
The lifeless hanged from trees give way to coffins.
Rows of coffins.
Endless coffins. A potters’ field of the lynched.
Bossier Parish and Caddo Parish, separated only by the Red River. An epicenter of American white supremacist terrorism.
Neshoba County, Mississippi, later famous for the murder of civil rights workers, also a lynching of sorts.
Lynched by a white mob of 15,000.
Lynched for not addressing a police officer by the title “mister.”
Burned alive by a mob of more than 1,000 men, women and children.
Pinellas County, Florida where, decades later, I would represent a black man convicted by an all-white jury and sentenced to death for raping and killing a white woman.
Hillsborough County, Florida, where, decades later, I would represent a black man wrongfully convicted of kidnapping and raping a white woman and a little girl.
Lynchings in parishes named for saints.
Hear me, they do not love your neck unnoosed and straight.
Call out each name to sanctify this place.
For the dead and for the living.
