Every year, hundreds of thousands of people walk the Camino de Santiago, a sacred pilgrimage to the remains of one of Jesus’ apostles. For many pilgrims the 500 mile walk represents a return to basic human values: simplicity, strength, and solidarity. Along the way, pilgrims commonly greet each other by saying ¡Bueno Camino! which means good path or way, but also acknowledges that the pilgrimage is part of an internal search that doesn’t end with the Compostela certificate.
I’ve considered flying to France and walking the 500 miles of the Camino, but I’ve never thought of going to Alabama. I’m not one of those blue staters who thinks the entire South should secede. It just didn’t seem like a place for me. I only have to look at the electoral map to see that.
But when a lynching Memorial opened last year, I had to go. When we arrived in Montgomery from Los Angeles, it was clear that others felt the same pull: we parked next to a family that had driven from South Carolina. Outside the museum that accompanies the memorial tour buses idled. Inside, there was barely room to move. We later met people from Houston and Halifax at the Dexter Avenue Church. They were visiting the Church, but they were in Montgomery for the memorial.
The memorial’s name, The Memorial for Justice and Peace, is purposefully generic. The Equal Justice Initiative, which built the memorial, wanted to avoid negative attention as the memorial was being built. If the name sanitizes a brutal history, the memorial does not. Throughout both the museum and the memorial, the crimes being remembered are called not just lynchings, but “race-based terror lynchings.” In addition to memorializing victims, the memorial very consciously modifies the language with which the story is told to more accurately capture the entire apparatus of violence and control.
But that terror does not get to give the memorial its name.
If the title eschews the word lynching it is perhaps because the people for whom this suffering is a birthright have borne the name of this particular crime, always in the face of maddening denial or craven skepticism, for long enough. Because African-American communities lived through the horrors of lynching and very self-consciously did not turn into the monsters they faced.
The memorial commemorates over 4,000 victims of lynching with hanging metal columns, one for each county where a lynching has been recorded. The plinths, carved with victims’ names, are ordered alphabetically by state first and then county in a descending spiral. The columns begin at eye level, but as the floor slopes down they start to hover above you—threatening weather, strange fruit.
Like other memorials that attempt to honor the individual life when thousands were lost the design is simultaneously intimate and overwhelming. As you walk below the plinths, the the individual names can no longer be read, yet the weight is unbearable.
Outside of the memorial, rows of these same steel plinths lie on their sides, duplicates intended for each county to take home to commemorate their dead. Inert, these columns do not have the buoyancy of the suspended blocks inside the reflecting area which amidst the sound of falling water seem weightless.
The prone columns are an invitation to other counties to extend the memorial’s reach, to become stops on a trail. Our Camino.
If other counties do claim their columns, the Memorial will no longer be a single site, but an albergue on a distinctly-American pilgrimage. When we asked our tour guide Michelle Browder whether she thought the Memorial was changing things in Montgomery, she answered without a beat, “You’re here.”
The Memorial is a call from people who stayed in Alabama in spite of the terror that turned six million African Americans into refugees in their own country. It is a call from the people who continue to stay in spite of the insidious racism of a twenty-year old white man referring to the grown black woman who works at a local shop as “girl,” or the man in a truck who flipped off Michelle at an intersection, or the church where the Montgomery Bus Boycott came to an end falling apart in a neighborhood of abandoned houses decimated by the 85 freeway. Graffiti on one of those abandoned houses reads: We care about you, black Montgomery.
Jim Crow-era “Confederate” monuments around the rest of the city, and the country, concretize specific views of historical events in the name of memorializing. This Memorial does not commemorate peace and justice. It enacts it. It begins another story that doesn’t end here. It is our Camino. It requires pilgrims.
And they’re coming. People are making pilgrimages to this memorial, and the living city is providing succor for visitors. The Memorial for Peace and Justice is one of the most recent and urgent additions to the Civil Rights Trail, an interactive rhizomatic collection of a hundred locations across fifteen states that requires people to go. With each visitor the trail is written and re-written. Different guides produce different narratives, which layered on top of each other and braided through, combine the extemporaneous and everyday with the considered and curated.
We’re in a new era of memorialization that calls for memorials that are experiential and embodied. The Memorial for Justice and Peace is a call for pilgrims to cut a trail through Montgomery, the rest of the South, and the rest of the country. It is part of our Camino. Go.