Four years on: the EJI lynching marker revisited
Four years ago the Montevallo Remembrance Project, a citizen's coalition, partnered with the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery to bring a commemorative lynching marker to town. One of the coalition’s co-leaders reflects on the meaning of the marker, then and now.
June 8, 2020. A historic marker commemorating a double lynching on Montevallo's Main Street was installed without ceremony across from City Hall. Without ceremony because in the early months of the pandemic no one knew how to safely manage public events. Four years ago the journey toward truth and reconciliation felt unfinished.
It still feels unfinished.
I was one of three co-leaders of the citizen's coalition that partnered with EJI to bring the marker to town. It was a rough ride at times.
Pictured above are the founders of the Montevallo Community Remembrance Project. Paul Mahaffey and Kathy King are on the left, and Sierra Turner on the right.
Not that anyone disputed the basic facts of the lynching. On a sweltering Saturday night in late August, 1889, after a day of heavy rain, two unnamed men of color died at the hands of a mob. They were accused of murdering a young white man the night before and, without trial, were hoisted over the limb of a tree at the corner of Shelby and Main streets. Their bodies were left to hang into the next day.
Their names were once known.
The horrific nature of the event hardly made a dent in the stories our town told about itself. It was just something that happened, a remote blip in our history. If mentioned at all, the double lynching was folded into a narrative about the casual brutality and rough frontier justice of its time. A standard account begins: "Acts of violence were not uncommon."
But violence of that sort was behind us. Montevallo had moved on.
That comforting narrative got a severe jolt in 2018 when EJI opened the Legacy Museum in Montgomery. Exhibits told a shockingly different story. Lynchings were anything but rough justice. They were deliberate acts of white terrorism. The wave of racial terror and intimidation that swept over the state in the late 1800s left a legacy of suspicion, fear, anger, shame, distrust, and mutual silence that has divided Alabama communities to this day. Communities like Montevallo.
Some of us, deeply moved by what we learned in Montgomery, wanted to bring the EJI message to town. We believed that reckoning with a racist past was a step toward repairing the damage. "We cannot heal the deep wounds inflicted during the era of racial terrorism until we tell the truth about it," writes Bryan Stevenson, founder of the EJI. The installation of the marker was a way to break the silence; a necessary first step toward truth and reconciliation; the beginning of communal healing.
The EJI’s Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama. The Legacy Museum offers a powerful, immersive journey through America’s history of racial injustice.
Others in our town were not so sure they wanted to see the story changed. Racism was real, of course, but it belongs to the past. Let's keep it there. Dire, if often vague, mutterings about the perils of shining a light on the ugly side of the town's history were heard. We encountered some organized resistance. It fizzled in the face of a citizenry that, on the whole, heard hope in EJI's message of truth and reconciliation.
In a 5-1 vote Aug. 26, 2019, the Montevallo City Council approved the installation of a commemorative marker on city property near the site of a double lynching of two African-American men in Montevallo in 1889.
Montevallo was prepared to move forward.
This is the Magnolia Hotel, which once stood near the site of the lynching. It became a rooming house for college students in the early days of the university. It may show the hanging tree.
One of the coalition co-leaders, Paul Mahaffey, hoped the marker would start "a dialogue about history in which silenced voices are finally heard." This more truthful understanding of our past, he wrote, "will lead to racial healing and social progress, and at this moment in history, both are desperately needed."
Members of the local African American community openly rejoiced. "The day we mark our History is the day we measure our Progress," wrote Tangee Edwards Williams. "Our voice united sounds like freedom," wrote another.
Personally, I could not have been prouder of our town.
In early 2023, a group of high school students traveled from Los Angeles along significant historical sites from the southern civil rights movement, and visited Main Street Montevallo on their trip.
But did the marker and approval process achieve EJI's goal? Did they promote community healing?
In some ways, yes. Parts of the University of Montevallo have embraced the EJI message. Discussions of the history and argument of the marker are now key pieces of the Peace and Justice Studies program. UM has begun to discuss -- to reckon with -- a remnant of the racist past in the heart of its campus. People are thinking about the fact that King House was once the "big house" of a plantation that ran on the forced labor of up to at least fifty persons of African descent at a time.
City Council has approved funding for a Montevallo African American Heritage Trail that would include the EJI marker. Plaques are already approved for placement on five other historically significant sites. Hopefully, they will be unveiled -- with the ceremony they deserve -- later this year. Once a month, Montevallo's Chamber Chatter publishes a full-page Untold Story of Black Montevallo. These affirming stories have appeared since October 2022.
The MLP board in early 2023 distributing the first volume of the Untold Stories of Black Montevallo booklet.
So, yes, the EJI marker has helped open the town's heart to the EJI message of truth and reconciliation. I am cheered by these developments. No longer do I approach the marker with a small pit of anxiety in my stomach, uncertain about what I might see. Graffiti? Something worse?
But I wonder. The people who four years ago opposed the marker, how do they feel now? Has the time come to look more generously at our differences? Or is this what a conversation deferred feels like?
Kathy King is co-founder and President of the Montevallo Legacy Project.
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