by Randy Cunningham

   (Plain Press December 2025) The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, a project of the Equal Justice Institute in Montgomery, Alabama is a complex of sites dedicated to commemorating the black experience in America from slavery and segregation, up to today’s New Jim Crow of mass incarceration. I think it is only equaled in power by the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC. Both will shake you to your core and if they don’t then there is something seriously wrong with you.

OPINION

   My wife, Tris Roberts, and I were guests of the Equal Justice Institute and the Black Environmental Leaders Association, with the mission of commemorating the murder of John Jordan in 1911 by an armed mob for the unpardonable crime of picking cherries from an orchard that was originally at the corner of West Boulevard and Clinton Avenue, not far from our house. Our mission was to take a jar of soil, collected at the site where the incident began, to Montgomery to be placed in a commemorative wall of other jars gathered from other lynching sites around the country.

   Our trip started at the Legacy Museum that commemorates the holocaust of slavery, the oppression of segregation, and the violence that continues with today’s mass incarceration. It is common now to just brush off this history, and file it away as if it was something bad that happened a long time ago that has no relevance to today. But slavery laid the economic and social foundations of our society, and most of the other societies of the Americas. The colonists who landed on the shores of the new world had a problem. They needed cheap – free labor – to generate the wealth that made American capitalism possible. That cheap labor came from the transatlantic slave trade.

   What was the key to prosperity for some was the front door of hell for others. The legacy museum is a self-guided tour through that hell, with powerful exhibits made up of statuary, testimonials, art and photography. If there are any young people who are considering a career in the science of museums, they must go to the Legacy Museum to see how it is done. It is a masterpiece that will grab you and not let you go.

   Probably the greatest challenge faced by the enslavers was how to rationalize behavior that in the words of Frederick Douglas, “would disgrace a nation of savages.” It is reasonable to expect that those involved in the slavery industry must have shown some morality in the rest of their lives. They were affectionate and faithful spouses, good friends, kind and loving parents, responsible members of their societies, and faithful church members. Then they could turn right around and practice the most savage brutality to those they owned.

   We have seen this schizoid personality before, when one of the most civilized and cultured countries in Europe followed Hitler into war and genocide. “Good” people cooperated with him, enabled him, and then excused themselves from responsibility after the war.

   With Gaza we see the same behavior from the civilized and cultured citizenry of Israel. The answer to how good people can behave like demons is that they come to look upon others as not human, not as human as they are. In the case of the United States the challenge of making 2 + 2 = 7 was solved by that venerable old ideology called white supremacy. It is the ideology that explains why others are not your equal and thus do not deserve what you deserve.

   These are questions that hit Tris and I close to home. We are both descended from Confederate Army officers and slave owners. We both had up close and personal experiences with racism in our families and the communities we were part of. Racism was up close and personal. Or, as my mother rationalized the racism, she grew up with in small town Missouri in the 1930s, “It was just the way things were.”

   In my view, second only to the power of the Legacy Museum was the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which is an outdoor exhibit in Montgomery that is most famous for the metal tablets organized by state and county, with the names of victims and the date of the lynchings, cut into the face of each tablet. They are mounted to the floors and hung from the ceilings of the structure that shelters them. This exhibit is powerful to walk through and read the accounts of what was at one time “just the way things were.”

   The impact was almost unbearable. For those who traced their roots to slavery, and whose ancestors were lucky enough to flee Jim Crow, it was stunning. This was their story cut into rusted tablets of history.

   A hired hand confronted three black men, John Jordan and two of his friends, about picking cherries from his bosses’ orchard. An argument ensued, pistols were drawn, and the chase was on between Jordan and a mob of hundreds who chased Jordan through the neighborhood, while exchanging shots. There were calls for him to be “strung up.” Jordan’s two companions escaped. The mob finally cornered Jordan and ended the confrontation with a shot gun blast. Jordan was loaded into an ambulance, and he died on the way to the hospital. A police lieutenant said that the incident could not be helped, or as the usual line goes, “Move along. Nothing more to see.” There was no investigation, no one was charged, and mob action and violence over a handful of cherries was forgotten.

   Given the history of racist violence in this country, stealing a handful of cherries looks like a major felony. The methodology of lynching varied. Some victims were hung. Some were burned alive. Some were shot. It all resulted in the same outcome. A lawless mob used violence to kill someone to achieve their idea of justice. After all, if Jordan got away with stealing cherries, who knows where it would end? Sometimes blacks were lynched simply for talking back to or merely disagreeing with a white person. Any old excuse was good enough to teach a lesson on who was on top and who was on the bottom of the hierarchy of power.

   At least in this case the victim had a name. It was common that no name or names were remembered. It was even common for the alleged offender to escape, and the mob would just grab and lynch whoever happened to be the wrong color at the wrong place. Things have not changed all that much, when Tamir Rice was shot and killed by police for playing with a toy gun, the police who shot him did not face any legal penalties. Move along. Nothing more to see.

   What I felt going through these exhibits was a feeling of being in the presence of pure evil. I have felt that before. In 1991 I visited the site of the massacred village of El Mozote in El Salvador. The United States backed Atlacatl Battalion of the Salvadoran Army, destroyed El Mozote in 1981, levelled the village and killed over eight hundred inhabitants. It was just to prove to the guerrillas of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) that there was nothing the army wouldn’t do to guarantee that those who had always ruled El Salvador would continue to do so. The same lesson that white lynch mobs taught to those who did not grovel before the god of white supremacy. The battalion did not waste bullets, or the swing of a machete, on the children. Instead, they hung the children from the trees. The massacre of El Mozote was a lynching.

   I have always relied on reason to help me understand the world. But when it comes to the history of lynching in the United States, and what happened at El Mozote, the language of reason is useless. On a mountain top in El Salvador and at the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, what I encountered was evil in its pure hellishness and arrogance. Evil that chased me down, cornered me like the mob cornered Jordan, and forced me to admit to its existence.

   Evil rides on the back of impunity ― the belief that you can do anything you want to whoever you want, just by the right of who you are. We are seeing a lot of that around the world and at home. Impunity is flourishing in the White House. It has given its marching orders to its functionaries who are doing everything they can to restore the rule of white, Christian men over everyone else in the United States. Impunity wears tactical uniforms, and face masks, and drives Sport Utility Vehicles (SUVs) with no plates, to snatch people off the streets. People who speak another language. People who are not whiter than white. People who are kidnapped because of who they are and what they represent. It is a logic that any participant of a lynch mob understood perfectly. The goal is to spread fear. Fear of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Fear of deportation to God only knows where. Fear to intimidate not only the target of the body snatchers, but fear to silence those who are protesting the reign of impunity or resisting impunity in the streets. Fear to make sure everyone in the United States understands who counts and who doesn’t.

   The Legacy Museum complex is a repudiation of everything Trump and Make America Great Again (MAGA) stand for. It is also an antidote to fear, because if anyone knew fear it was the slaves and their descendants. But still they resisted and continue to resist, and so can the rest of us. Evil and impunity need not win.

[Editor’s Note: For more information on The Legacy Museum, contact legacysites.eji.org.]