From Legacy to Memory: Reckoning with Racial Violence at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice

• DOI: 10.1177/00027162211011604
• Date: 01 March 2021
• Published date: 01 March 2021
• Author: Christina Simko
• Subject Matter: Contemporary Analyses and Implications

ANNALS, AAPSS, 694, March 2021 157

DOI: 10.1177/00027162211011604

From Legacy to

Memory:

Reckoning with

Racial Violence

at the National

Memorial for

Peace and

Justice

By

CHRISTINA SIMKO

1011604ANN THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMYFROM LEGACY TO MEMORY

research-article2021

How are the legacies of violent pasts brought into

collective memory? Even as social scientists have

systematically documented the long shadow that

racially motivated lynching has cast into the present,

this history has had little place within dominant national

narratives. Recently, however, the Equal Justice

Initiative’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice in

Montgomery, Alabama, has broken through the silence,

attracting widespread attention and praise. This article

examines how the memorial creatively adapts morally

and emotionally resonant themes from dominant

national narratives to bridge long-standing mnemonic

cleavages between Black and white Americans. In

addition, the article provides preliminary evidence that

the legacies of racial violence are gaining a place in

national memory.

Keywords: collective memory; memorials; race; vio-

lence; narrative

“Memorialize George Floyd and others as

lynching victims,” opined longtime reporter

Mark Pinsky in the Orlando Sentinel on June

17, 2020. Beneath the headline is an image of

the Corten steel monuments that rise overhead

at the Equal Justice Initiative’s (EJI) National

Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery,

Alabama. Each represents a county where at

least one “racial terror lynching” took place

between 1877 and 1950. Noting that the memo-

rial has been “universally praised for its simple

symbolic power” since its opening in 2018,

Pinsky mobilizes it to link past and present,

arguing that George Floyd, Breonna Taylor,

Ahmaud Arbery, and other African American

victims of “police and vigilante killings” should

have their names inscribed.

Christina Simko is an assistant professor of sociology at

Williams College and the author of The Politics of

Consolation: Memory and the Meaning of September

11 (Oxford University Press 2015).

Correspondence: cs9@williams.edu