Memorial to confront South's troubled history of lynchings (GA)
By JAY REEVES
ASSOCIATED PRESS
updated Saturday, October 1, 2016 - 5:28pm
...The nonprofit Equal Justice Initiative has announced it is building a memorial in the state capital of Montgomery devoted to 4,075 blacks its research shows were killed by lynching in the U.S. from 1877 to 1950.
The nonprofit’s director, Bryan Stevenson, said the aim is to help “change the landscape” of American racial discourse by openly acknowledging a painful past, much as Germany has Holocaust memorials and South Africa a museum on its past state-sanctioned segregation – apartheid.
... the memorial’s focus will be on “terror lynchings” against blacks in a dozen Southern states — whether by hanging, gunshots, beatings, burnings or other forms of killing used in the past to terrorize black communities.
“I don’t think we can afford to continue pretending that there aren’t these really troubling chapters in our history,” Stevenson said. “I think we’ve got to deal with it” ...
http://onlineathens.com/features/2016-10-01/memorial-confront-souths-troubled-history-lynchings
