Montgomery is home to a memorial to those who have been lynched - an act that has been prevelant throughout the ages and has taken a nasty root in the history of the America. An act already hanous, it is only made worse by it's focus on african americans and minorities, as a way to maintain leverage over slaves, then as a signal of malice and stupidity, and an ultimate act of disrespect for fellow people & the systems of government the perpetrators live under. Upon walking through the memorial in the heat of the sun, reading the preamble, and then the names and dates of those lynched, I was confronted with a reality that seems at once far removed from our own, and entirely too believeable and close.
The surrounding city and countryside is filled with reasonable, cultured peoples: it is not at all what I expect to find when I picture types of people who would perform such an act. Rather than continuing to speak in relatively commonly held terms about the subject, I will let the pictures speak for themselves. One important thing of note here is that each of the following pillars contains the names of those lynched, cut into its surface, and for each of those names, a person existed.
