A museum, including a memorial dedicated to thousands of Black victims of lynching, scheduled to open in 2017 in Montgomery, Alabama.
The Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), based in Montgomery, Alabama, announced its plans to build The Memorial to Peace and Justice. The first of its kind memorial will pay tribute to the estimated 4,000 plus Black victims of “racial terror lynchings,” defined as “acts of violence that were done with complete impunity, where there was no risk of prosecution,” between 1877 and 1950.
During the most active years of lynching, the population of Blacks in the country was an estimated 7 million. Lynching reached its peak in 1892. When configured for today’s population, the 4,000 victims calculated by the EJI translates to about 24,000 lives lost — about eight times the number of people who died on 9/11.
