By any measure, Bryan Stevenson has achieved incredible things during his career as a civil rights lawyer in the deep south of America. He has spared more than 128 people from the death chamber; brought the plight of children sentenced to die in prison before the US supreme court, which ruled the practice unlawful; and has been one of the country’s leading critics of mass incarceration of African Americans.
And now, his years of legal work and activism have led him to create a national memorial in Montgomery, Alabama. It is America’s only memorial dedicated to lynching victims.
Over six acres, 800 rusted steel cylinders suspended in the air represent the more than 4,000 men and women lynched at the hands of white people in America between 1877 and 1950.
Each slab carries the names of victims and the county where their lynchings took place, most of them in southern states: Georgia, Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana ...
As our journalist Jamiles Lartey observed, to walk through the site is to symbolically watch a person being hanged by the mob. Inscriptions give the public the deplorable reasons why victims were killed: for “frightening” a white girl, for standing around in a white neighbourhood, for organising coal miners, for daring to ask a white woman for a glass of water.
Our task as editors and reporters was how to do justice to this remarkable story. How would we be able to capture the essence of what remains a daring proposition in today’s America? Should we show readers the horror of lynchings by using graphic pictures (we decided the answer was yes). Should we be as bold as Stevenson and use words such as “sadism” in our headlines, knowing that some readers would find that hard to stomach? (Again, we decided yes).
We also wanted to underline an essential feature of the memorial and its twin Legacy Museum: that they are not academic pieces rooted in the past, but explorations of modern America that draw a direct line from slavery to the present day. Just last month a young man called Diante Yarber was killed in a hail of bullets fired by a police officer; two black men were kicked out of a Starbucks for “trespassing” (they weren’t); and a woman named Chikesia Clemons was arrested and tackled to the floor by a policeman, her breasts exposed, after a disagreement with a store employee.
The Guardian shares Stevenson’s commitment to confront the battles of today by airing and understanding the sins of the past, which is why we were determined to portray his creation as powerfully and meaningfully as possible.
For us, journalistically, that meant relating some of the highly distressing stories of what happened in the lynching era, as well as exploring some of the contemporary manifestations of racial injustice in the US. This resulted in our series Pain and terror: America’s history of racism
The Equal Justice Initiative, Stevenson’s civil rights organisation, gave us full access as their media partners at the two-day summit that they held to mark the opening of the memorial and museum. Our first challenge was to find a special way of portraying the memorial itself, deploying the Guardian’s full range of journalistic tools, including video, reportage and photography.
We wanted to find a relative of someone who had been touched by lynching to walk through the memorial grounds with the Guardian team. We were grateful, with EJI’s help, to be able to tell the extraordinary story of Vanessa Croft, whose uncle Fred was forced to flee Alabama as a teenager, having narrowly escaped his own lynching.
On the day of the shoot, a storm brewed in Alabama. The weather forecast was so bad that it looked as though Croft, who lives two hours from Montgomery, would be unable to reach us. To our huge relief, she decided to brave it and having negotiated torrential rain spent an hour with us walking through the memorial. It was a moving experience for us: not only did she share her family’s most traumatic event, she also gave us a glimpse of what it’s like to be a black woman living in the deep south in 2018: just a few weeks ago, after work, she was followed by a huge truck sporting two confederate flags all the way home.
You can read more about Croft’s story, as well as the odious crimes committed in the lynching period, in our feature The Sadism Of White Men: Why America Must Atone for its Lynchings.
All in all, the Guardian spent four days on the ground, reporting from the EJI summit. We listened to, and interviewed, many of the most prominent advocates for racial justice in America today, including the reverends Jesse Jackson and William Barber, the US hip hop band The Roots, the film maker Ava duVernay, the former vice president Al Gore and a senator, Cory Booker.
It was striking that thousands of people, black and white, had travelled long distances – including across the country – to mark this event. There was a sense, which we tried to convey in our journalism, that a major taboo in American cultural life had finally been broken. By acknowledging the fiercely uncomfortable truth of what white supremacy had done to so many communities, over so many years, the beginning of a process of healing had begun.
By the end of Friday we felt we had helped, in some small way, to tell the story of America’s truth and reconciliation. That sense of something new was felt powerfully when standing in a crowd of thousands of young Alabamans in Montgomery’s Riverfront park for EJI’s final event: a concert of top musicians who support the mission.
The surprise guest was announced by Stevenson himself. As Stevie Wonder made his way to the middle of the stage, a devotional silence fell in the crowd. With a hint of melancholy in his voice, the singer made an impassioned speech about the lynching victims, saying he shared their pain.
He then performed an unscheduled, spine-tingling rendition of the Negro spiritual Swing Low, Swing Chariot.
“Well now if you get there before I do, comin’ for to carry me home”, sang Wonder, whose mother was from Alabama, “Tell all my friends that I’m a comin’ too, comin’ for to carry me home.”
