The Weight of Terror

In the Spring of 2023, my wife and I visited the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum, the Montgomery Bus Boycott Memorial, Dr. Martin Luther King’s Home, the Legacy Museum, and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which is an outdoor memorial to victims of lynching. These locations along the Civil Rights Trail made a profound impression on me, but the National Memorial for Peace and Justice really disturbed me—as all white Americans need to be disturbed.

The Equal Justice Initiative founded the National Memorial for Peace and Justice as a memorial to the thousands of black Americans who lost their lives between the Civil War and World War II to lynching. The monument consists of 805 suspended steel rectangular prisms, each representing a county or state with a recorded lynching. A visitor walks through the first prisms at eye level to descend into the memorial’s center, where the prisms are viewed from below.

The memorial had a sobering impact on me as a white American, as I have indirectly benefited from slavery, campaigns of terror, and Jim Crow laws in the South. In addition to this, I struggled to see what I could add to the memorial. It already accomplishes its purpose as a public statement from African Americans memorializing lynching victims and testifies to the wrongs perpetrated by white Americans.

After a year and a half of contemplation, reading, writing, and coursework, I decided that the best approach would be to combine the images with historical photographs representing the lives of black Americans in the shadow of violence. This series of online images combines photos of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice with historical public domain images. The purpose of the exhibit is to interrogate notions of success in America and how white Americans believe that their success is due to their hard work, ignoring the labor inputs of slavery and the terror that kept a low-cost workforce down, depriving them of life, freedom, and property.

Through these photos, I want to create a theopoetic of the oppressor—not praising the oppressor but convicting the oppressor. I want a theopoetic that will acknowledge the weight of lynching over the endeavors of African Americans to try to make something of their freedom.

The photos in this exhibition were taken in April of 2023 at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. Selected images were converted to high-contrast black and white to try and recapture some of the weight lost through disconnection with the physical mass carried by the memorial.

In my Violence in Story and Theory class, we discussed whether depictions of violence moved people to enact change or caused further trauma to victimized parties. Rather than use lynching photos, which were souvenirs of the lynchings themselves, I have chosen to focus on juxtaposing the memorial with the images of what was lost or damaged in the African American community as well as with the images that indicate what white America was doing to ignore the issue.

The images are combined to illustrate the relationship between the threat of lynching and attempts by African Americans to build on their promised freedoms through politics, education, business, art, and family. These attempts are shown beneath the presence of the memorial to indicate the oppressive weight of terror caused by America’s history of lynching and racial violence. Elements of the white church in America are shown looking away from the memorial or imprisoned in its very darkness (Billy Sunday). Though its imagery lingers, the black church and civil rights protestors are shown pushing through the memorial.

One element of society I am speaking to is the white Christian church in America. These images call the oppressor to responsibility, repentance, reconciliation, and reparation. I want to help us open our eyes to the presence of Christ in the suffering of black Americans throughout the history of the country. If we can see what has been done to our brothers and sisters in Christ, we may begin to repent and repair the rift. As James Cone has said, “Until we can see the cross and the lynching tree together until we can identify Christ with a “recrucified” black body hanging from a lynching tree, there can be no genuine understanding of Christian identity in America, and no deliverance from the brutal legacy of slavery and white supremacy.”[1] The Equal Justice Initiative, creators of the memorial, calls for Americans to see the violence that has been done, reflect on it, and acknowledge it publicly.[2]

As Christian artists, it is one of our responsibilities to truly see the world as it is and to show the Church the truth of the matter. Artist and author Makoto Fujimura states, “If we care to know how deep the suffering of Christ goes—and how vast and even violent is the restoration process through Christ’s suffering—then we had better start with knowing the dark, cruel reality of the fallen world.”[3]

In Reparations: A Christian Call for Repentance and Repair, Duke Kwon and Gregory Thompson call for “…four spiritual commitments: the vulnerability of community, the humiliation of truth, the renunciation of control, and the revaluation of wealth.”[4] I hope that my exhibit exemplifies the humiliation of truth.

I hope that I can finally speak to what I saw at this Memorial of lynching victims throughout the United States and present these thoughts with the photographs I took over a year ago.

Weaving an artistic statement around someone else’s pain is challenging, especially when I am a perpetrator. With this project, I have attempted to illuminate how the threat of lynching has harmed—and continues to harm—black Americans to the benefit of white Americans. Through this, I hope I can listen to it, sit with it, and then begin to incorporate practices of repentance within my daily life.

I hope that others can experience this as well.

[1] Cone, James H, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2011, xv

[2] Equal Justice Initiative, Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror, 3rd ed. Montgomery, AL: Equal Justice Initiative, 2017. http://eji.org/reports/lynching-in-america, 66

[3] Fujimura, Makoto, Silence and Beauty: Hidden Faith Born of Suffering, Downers Grove, Illinois: IVP Books, an imprint of InterVarsity Press, 2016, 167

[4] Kwon, Duke L, and Gregory Thompson, Reparations: A Christian Call for Repentance and Repair Grand Rapids, Michigan: Brazos Press, a division of Baker Books, 2021, 187