National Memorial for Peace and Justice

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice is a memorial in Montgomery, Alabama, dedicated to victims of racial terror lynching. Opened in April 2018 with the Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration, it was described as the first comprehensive memorial in the country devoted to those victims. Its significance in the book lies both in that dedication and in the work of public memory it represents: bringing histories of racial violence into view as part of an account of justice in the present.

Opening and purpose

The memorial opened in April 2018 as part of a paired public-history project with the Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration. The memorial’s subject is specific: victims of racial terror lynching. The book presents it as the country’s first comprehensive memorial dedicated to them, giving public form to a history that had too often been neglected or obscured.

Its opening followed years of work by the Equal Justice Initiative to document slavery, lynching, and segregation in the United States. The memorial was therefore not presented as an isolated monument, but as one part of a broader effort to make racial history legible and to deepen public understanding of the nation’s history of racial injustice.

The history it brings into public view

The memorial’s subject belongs to a longer history of racial terror. The book connects lynching to the period after Reconstruction, when violence and intimidation were used to deny African Americans political and social rights. It also describes how Confederate symbols were repeatedly invoked in resistance to racial progress: their use intensified after school segregation was declared unconstitutional, and Confederate flags were raised atop state government buildings in Southern states.

That history is linked in the book to the development of criminal punishment. It argues that racial terrorism through lynching helped create the modern death penalty, as speedy executions partly redirected the violence of lynching while assuring white Southerners that Black men would still face the ultimate punishment. The memorial’s dedication to lynching victims thus recalls not only individual deaths but a history of racial violence connected to the institutions and practices of justice.

Public memory and the stories a place tells

The memorial’s work takes on added force beside the book’s account of Monroeville, Alabama, and its public celebration of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. Local leaders turned the old courthouse into a Mockingbird museum, and the Mockingbird Players of Monroeville staged the story for audiences at home and on national and international tours. Yet the book observes that admiration for the novel often left its harder truths unaddressed. The fictional Black defendant, Tom Robinson, is convicted despite being innocent; after a desperate escape attempt, he is shot seventeen times in the back.

The contrast is especially sharp in the account of Walter McMillian, who grew up near Monroeville and had never heard of Harper Lee or the novel. The memorial does not simply preserve an idealized story of racial injustice confronted by a courageous lawyer. Its stated dedication directs attention to actual victims of racial terror, while the paired museum and the initiative behind both institutions place that history within a wider national narrative.

A continuing institutional project

The memorial emerged alongside the Equal Justice Initiative’s race and poverty initiative, which sought to change how racial history is discussed and to place contemporary race issues in historical context. That work included a racial history calendar for 2013 and 2014, educational programs and discussions for hundreds of high school students, and work with poor children and families in Black Belt counties across the South. The initiative also produced reports and materials about slavery, lynching, and the nation’s history of racial injustice.

The book connects this historical work to contemporary criminal-justice concerns rather than treating the past as closed. It describes racial disparities in jury selection and the continuing exclusion of Black potential jurors, even after legal rulings against discriminatory practices. In this setting, the memorial’s public remembrance of racial terror forms part of a larger effort to confront the historical narratives and assumptions that shape present-day understandings of race and justice.