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THE GREENSBORO TIMES


BY LAMAR E. DELOATCH The Afro-American Historical & Genealogical Society of Greensboro


Equal Justice Initiative Museum and Memorial Opening


attended the Equal Justice Initiative Museum and Memorial opening on April 26 - 29, 2018. It was an eye opening experience. I saw the names of my relatives listed on the hundreds of steel columns dangling from beams symbolizing lynching victims at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama. I was wondering is this the time that our United States President was referring to when he said, “Let’s make America great again”.


When I arrived in Montgomery, Alabama and exited off I-85,


I passed a highway exit sign advertising the “First White House of the Confederacy,” the former residence of Jefferson Davis. Later that day we traveled to the northern part of Alabama, I saw a Confederate flag flying near an off-ramp, planted there by an organization celebrating the descendants of Confederate veterans. I knew we were in the deep South.


The Equal Justice Museum (EJI) and Memorial is unlike anything


I have ever experienced and I hope millions of people here in America and abroad will come to visit. But I will leave the reviews and analysis to others. What stood out to me as I pondered the political implications of the moment, is the clarity of historical exposition from slavery to Jim Crow that Bryon Stevenson, founder and president of the Equal Justice Initiative referred to as a “new caste system” arising from mass incarceration. He wants us to confront our country’s racial terrorism and then say, ‘Never again’


After the Civil War, whites in the South refused to give up their


control over black populations or the racial bigotry upon which it was based. While sharecropping and Jim Crow laws kept blacks not completely free, the criminal-justice system was used to replicate slavery; blacks were imprisoned for minor offenses and then rented out for forced labor. By


1898, 73 percent of Alabama’s state revenue came from convict leasing. The Equal Justice Initiative has identified more than four thousand


four hundred lynching victims, many of them unnamed, from eight hundred and five counties, mostly in the South. All lynching’s occurred between 1877 and 1950. The organization says it is still receiving information about previously unknown lynching murders by White mobs.


Lynching was not only in the Deep South; the Washington, D.C.


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suburbs, Maryland and Virginia had their share, as did Ohio, Illinois and West Virginia. Lynching slowly ending around 1950, and the civil rights


Equal Justice > page 14


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