Bryan Stevenson on Memorializing Our Country's Shameful History

On the Media | May 26, 2017

From New Orleans to Charlottesville to St. Louis, cities across the country are grappling with whether to take down Confederate monuments and symbols and asking what, if anything, should go up in their place. 

Bryan Stevenson, director of the Equal Justice Initiative, has plans. His legal rights group has been documenting the stories of over 4,000 victims of lynching in the South from 1877 to 1950, and has also been putting up markers at lynching sites since 2013. Next year, EJI is opening a museum and a memorial in Montgomery, Alabama to commemorate victims of lynching and chronicle the continuum of racism from slavery to mass incarceration. Stevenson talks to Brooke about the designs for these projects, what it means for Confederate statues to come down now, and the significance of cultural spaces for reckoning with our shameful past.

Song:

Walking By Flashlight by Maria Schneider

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