Memorial Powerfully Confronts Legacy of Lynching

On April 26, 2018, The Equal Justice Initiative opened the Memorial for Peace and Justice. It also opened the Legacy Museum, which tells the stories of the over 4,000 people killed by racial terror lynchings in the century after the Civil War. The museum highlights the connections between this history of terror to modern manifestations of violence towards people of color, including mass incarceration and the death penalty. The opening drew thousands of visitors from across the country, including prominent civil rights advocates. The memorial and museum were inspired in part by the criminal defense work of the Equal Justice Initiative, which began with the representation of indigent prisoners on Alabama’s death row and later expanded to oppose juvenile life sentences and mass incarceration. Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, hopes that confronting our past can help move us into the future with greater resolve to end the modern manifestations of racialized terror in the criminal justice system and beyond. Learn more here.