Memorial to Victims of Lynchings Finished: viewed for the first time on 60 Minutes, Sunday, April 8

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Asst. Regtl. Quartermaster Gettysburg 2017
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In a region where symbols of the Confederacy are ubiquitous, an unprecedented memorial takes shape.

On the corner of Washington and Decatur streets in Montgomery, Alabama, a visitor can feel history pressing in from every side. Just down the street is the church where Martin Luther King Jr. and others planned the Montgomery bus boycott. Two blocks away sits the First White House of the Confederacy, where Jefferson Davis once lived. But although the city is crowded with historical markers—including, by one count, 59 Confederate memorials, and a similar number devoted to the civil-rights movement—you won’t find many markers of the racial violence following Reconstruction.

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EJI (Rendering)

Soon, however, on a six-acre site overlooking Montgomery’s Cottage Hill neighborhood, just a stone’s throw from the Rosa Parks Museum, the Memorial to Peace and Justice [1] will serve as a national monument to the victims of lynchings. It will be the first such memorial in the U.S., and, its founders hope, it will show how lynchings of black people were essential to maintaining white power in the Jim Crow South. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazin...o-america-s-known-victims-of-lynching/540663/

New Memorial to be viewed for the first time on 60 Minutes, Sunday, April 8 at 7:00 p.m., ET/PT on CBS.


Oprah Winfrey gets first look inside memorial to the victims of lynching

The new memorial is dedicated to the thousands of victims of lynching that took place over a 70-year period following the Civil War

Oprah Winfrey brings 60 Minutes cameras into a new memorial dedicated to the thousands of victims of lynching that took place over a 70-year period following the Civil War. It will be the first time the public sees the inside of the structure and its 805 steel markers, each bearing the names of people murdered – often with thousands of onlookers amid a picnic-like atmosphere. Her report will be broadcast on 60 Minutes, Sunday, April 8 at 7:00 p.m., ET/PT on CBS.

Each marker represents a state county and contains the names of victims of documented lynching from that area. The memorial takes up six acres in the heart of Montgomery, Alabama, perhaps the best known city in the struggle for civil rights. Alabama was also the scene of 361 documented lynchings.

The efforts to build "The National Memorial for Peace and Justice" were led by Bryan Stevenson, a lawyer who founded the Equal Justice Initiative. Asked by Winfrey why he chose to commemorate lynching as opposed to other injustices done by white people to the Black Community, he says the murderous acts were a way for whites to maintain political control over African Americans, who were supposed to get the right to vote after the Civil War. "Lynching was especially effective because it would allow the whole community to know that we did this to this person… a message that if you try to vote, if you try to advocate for your rights… anything that complicates ****…a nd political power, we will kill you." https://www.cbsnews.com/news/oprah-...-inside-memorial-to-the-victims-of-lynchings/
 
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