SHINING A SPOTLIGHT ON LYNCHING.

• Author: Bubar, Joe
• Position: TIMES PAST

The first memorial to honor the victims of lynching opens in Montgomery, Alabama--and raises the question: What does it mean to confront the past?

Eight hundred weathered steel beams hang from the roof of a new memorial in Montgomery, Alabama. Etched on each column is the name of a U.S. county and the people who were lynched there.

There's Caleb Gadly, lynched in Kentucky in 1894 for "walking behind the wife of his white employer"; Mary Turner, a pregnant woman, who was hung upside down, burned alive, then sliced open after denouncing her husband's 1918 lynching by a white mob; and Parks Banks, hanged in Mississippi in 1922 for carrying a photograph of a white woman.

Thousands more are listed, many simply as "unknown" because their remains were never identified.

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which opened earlier this year alongside a museum that explores the history of racism in America, is unlike any memorial this country has ever seen. It's the first one dedicated to the thousands of African-Americans who were lynched during a decades-long campaign of racial terror from the late 1800s to the mid-1900s. While monuments to the Civil War and Confederate leaders dot the Southern landscape, the stories of these murdered men, women, and children have been largely downplayed or even ignored--until now.

Part of the power of the memorial is "just seeing the names of all these people," says Bryan Stevenson, the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative (E.J.I.), the nonprofit organization behind the site. Many of them, he says, "have never been named in public."

4,000 Lynchings

The memorial shines a light on one of the nation's least recognized atrocities. More than 4,000 lynchings took place in the South between 1877 and 1950, according to a recent report by the E.J.I. Lynchings also happened in smaller numbers in the North. The total number of lynchings may never be known, as many went unreported or uninvestigated by local police.

Lynchings became widespread after the Civil War (1861-65), mostly in the South, as a tool to re-establish white supremacy--the belief that white people are superior to people of all other races and should therefore have control over society. During the period following the war, known as Reconstruction (1865-77), African-Americans were granted some freedoms. Congress passed the 14th Amendment, which gave black people citizenship and equal protection under the law, and the 15th Amendment, which gave black men the right to vote. For the first time, blacks in the South cast ballots, sat on juries, and were even elected to Congress--with the help of federal troops sent to the South to enforce the laws.

For many former slave owners, this was their worst fear come true.

"If blacks were allowed to continue, white supremacists surmised, they just might eclipse white people," says historian Kidada Williams, who has written a book on lynching. "That could not be allowed."

So when the federal government withdrew troops in 1877, it unleashed a violent backlash from many whites who were bitter about having to treat their former slaves as equals. And it gave rise to white supremacist groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan, which terrorized blacks across the South.

Whites often used lynching as a way to suppress the black vote and to enforce Jim Crow laws, which segregated whites and blacks in public spaces, such as restrooms, restaurants, and schools. Lynchings continued into the 1950s and '60s, as African-Americans began to challenge the status quo during the civil rights movement.

The Murder of Emmett Till

In 1955, a 14-year-old black boy from Chicago named Emmett Till was buying candy at a grocery store in Mississippi when a white woman accused him of grabbing her. Four days later, Till was kidnapped, tortured, and killed. Nobody was ever convicted of the murder. The lynching made national news and became a catalyst for the civil rights movement.

It was also representative of one of the most pervasive and irrational fears during the Jim Crow era: that black males were preying on white women. Nearly 25 percent of the lynching victims E.J.I, documented were black males accused of sexual misconduct against white women.

Many other African-Americans were hanged for minor transgressions, such as using profane language, refusing to step off a sidewalk to make way for a white person, or failing to address a police officer as "mister."

Lynchings were frequently advertised in newspapers and held in prominent public spaces in front of thousands of white people, including children. White spectators sometimes had picnics and posed with the hanged bodies for photographs to send to loved ones.

"As public events, lynchings were meant to be seen and recorded," says Williams. "They were meant to terrorize and instill fear in black people for resisting white supremacy."

The fear of being lynched ripped apart many black families and communities. It played a major role in causing the Great Migration--when more than 6 million black Southerners fled to cities in the North, Midwest, and West from about 1916 to 1970.

Lynchings were tolerated--and often aided--by local officials. Only 1 percent of all the lynching cases after 1900 resulted in criminal convictions, according to the E.J.I. And efforts to make lynching a federal offense repeatedly failed: Nearly 200 anti-lynching bills were introduced in Congress between 1882 and 1968, but none were approved by the Senate.

That may change: In June, three...