{"id":24,"date":"2019-11-01T23:45:12","date_gmt":"2019-11-02T03:45:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/audio-journalism\/?p=24"},"modified":"2020-02-10T05:06:15","modified_gmt":"2020-02-10T10:06:15","slug":"24","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/audio-journalism\/2019\/11\/01\/24\/","title":{"rendered":"Arriving in Alabama"},"content":{"rendered":"

By: Mallory Williamson<\/span><\/p>\n

After touching down in Montgomery on Sunday, our class didn\u2019t waste much time before beginning the Civil Rights-era tour part of our Southern journey. Our first stop after getting lunch was at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Also known as the Lynching Memorial, the site dedicated to known and unknown victims of lynching in the U.S. is considered a sacred place and is closely monitored by security officials. Once inside, we walked through spirals of hanging \u2018coffins\u2019 labeled with the name of a state or a county that list the names and death dates of all known lynching victims in that locality.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Across the street from the memorial was a small visitors\u2019 center with rows of jars along its walls, each one filled with dirt from a lynching site and labeled with the victim\u2019s name. Just as the county names on the hanging coffins give each lynching a haunting sense of place, the dirt from the lynching sites serves as a reminder that we unthinkingly walk on the same land where such atrocities might have occurred.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

As someone whose roots are in the South\u2014and whose hometown had a hanging coffin with three lynching victims listed\u2014visiting the Lynching Memorial was a horrifying experience. The notion that the soil where my house stands and the woods where I played as a child could have been (and at least, were near) the site of something so horrendous was sobering. It is one thing to know in the abstract that our country was built on the backs of racial terror and another to confront that it\u2019s happened in my neighborhood.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I am not particularly prone to outward displays of emotion, but I gasped audibly when I saw the name of the county where I\u2019ve lived my whole life\u2014and the ones where my parents, and their parents, spent their childhoods\u2014listed among the hanging coffins. I\u2019d realized fairly quickly upon entering the memorial that it was a possibility, but the irrefutable presentation that the fairly inconspicuous place where I grew up has such a dark, unerasable history rocked me.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s a privilege, as a young white woman with Southern heritage, to first think about football and sweet tea and orange leaves when I consider my roots. It\u2019s also an incomplete thought\u2014racial tension and terror are as entrenched in the South as the SEC \u2014 and I was reminded at the memorial that it\u2019s necessary to temper my love for my home with the knowledge that its establishment is owed in no small part to forced labor and brutal discrimination.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I sent some friends of mine from home photos of the memorial soon after we\u2019d left with a short explanation of what the names inscribed represented. After I\u2019d sent the messages, though, I realized even the photos wouldn\u2019t adequately convey the horror. I think it was the juxtaposition between the beautiful blue sky and green grass outside\u2014the same kind of weather I most strongly associate with home\u2014and the hanging reminders of what deep evil can transpire even on similarly gorgeous days that struck me most thoroughly.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Just as my subconscious knowledge that <\/span>my<\/span><\/i> South was the same South which fought a war to keep slavery had never truly been enough to make me consider the legacy of the land where I grew up, sending a photo or two in the high school group chat wasn\u2019t likely going to be enough to make an impact.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Our visit to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, while horrifying, provided crucial historical context for the continuing oppression faced by Black people and communities which may feature centrally in the stories our class reports from Mound Bayou.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By: Mallory Williamson After touching down in Montgomery on Sunday, our class didn\u2019t waste much time before beginning the Civil Rights-era tour part of our Southern journey. Our first stop after getting lunch was at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice.\u00a0 Also known as the Lynching Memorial, the site dedicated to known and unknown … Continue reading Arriving in Alabama<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1740,"featured_media":18,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/audio-journalism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/audio-journalism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/audio-journalism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/audio-journalism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1740"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/audio-journalism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/audio-journalism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/audio-journalism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24\/revisions\/28"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/audio-journalism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/audio-journalism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/audio-journalism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/audio-journalism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}