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By Burt Michaels, Class of 2019

“The single greatest work of 21^st century American architecture,” asserted the Dallas Morning News architecture critic. “The most successful memorial design since the 1982 debut of Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial.”

Strong claims, typical of the worldwide praise upon its opening in 2018.

“It” being the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama—the lynching memorial. 

MASS Design Group, the not-for-profit architectural firm whose mantra is ”Justice is Beauty,” designed it. They also designed the show-stealing, gut-wrenching Memorial for Victims of Gun Violence at the 2019 Chicago Biennial.

The memorial’s hilly, six-acre site overlooks the neoclassical Alabama State Capitol with its monumental statue of Jefferson Davis in front. The first Confederate White House is across the street. The Alabama legislature recently barred nearby Selma from renaming the Edmund Pettus Bridge, whose eponym was a Confederate general and Ku Klux Klan leader. 

From a distance, the memorial evokes the Acropolis—elevated, big, flat-roofed, and seemingly supported by columns.  On closer examination what appeared to be columns are actually steel blocks hanging from the beams, not supporting them. 

The entry is cramped and ill-lit (compression). Visitors then move outside to a pathway (expansion) surrounded by steel slabs, more than 800 of them. The first slabs are at eye level, making it easy to read: a county, a state, and then a list of the people lynched there between 1880 and 1950. More than 4000, all documented by the Equal Justice Institute.

It’s austere. Minimalist. Stark. Like Dirk Lohan’s memorial in Graceland Cemetery for his grandfather. All these rectangles repeating over and over, like a Miesian dream. Transparent: inside and out flow together, more even than the Apple store on Michigan Avenue. I felt guilty for paying attention to the architecture, the beauty of it, its precise details, when I should have thought about the victims… 

As the path slopes downwards, the slabs get higher until they’re far overhead and hanging like…strange fruit. When it rains, the Corten steel runs red like blood. No Acropolis, this; rather, a gallows hill. It’s like you’re in the depths of hell. The beauty is not a distraction; it leads you here, to a place you’ve not been.

The path leads on to a grassy expanse.  Slabs lay flat on the ground like coffins–duplicates of those hanging. Communities moving toward reconciliation can claim them to erect them where the lynchings occurred. The architecture, its beauty, isn’t just for emotional catharsis; it’s a call to action.

The memorial’s sister institution is the Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration.  One exhibit is a wall of jars, more than 800 so far, filled with soil taken from where the lynchings took place and inscribed with victims’ names. Volunteers across the South collect the soil. 

The museum narrates how slavery evolved into Jim Crow, enforced by white-supremacist terrorism, especially lynching. And then to mass incarceration, enforced by 21st century terrorism: stabbings in hellish, overcrowded prisons, gun violence in the streets, including killings by police—contemporary “lynchings”.

The Dallas architecture critic calls a “pilgrimage” to the memorial “a moral imperative.” I would add  an intellectual, aesthetic, and civic imperative as well.

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